Shoot the Moonlight Out, page 8
Lily said two to three pages, which seems like a million pages to him.
The words start coming. They just keep coming, one after the other, appearing in front of him on the page. They’re coming from his mind, through the tips of his fingers, clattering from the keys up through the spindly strikers and onto the page in faint (but not too faint to see) black ink. He doesn’t know anything about how to format a story, so his lines are tight, his transitions nonexistent, his margins wild. It doesn’t look like Amelia’s novel—all that white space and neatness.
The story he’s writing is from the point of view of the kid who threw the rock that killed Amelia. Jack’s calling him Nobody Boy. He tries to feel empathy for him—it had to have been a kid. There were no leads other than some boys spotted running away, no good witnesses. Anyhow, who else would do that except a kid who doesn’t understand the world?
A feeling of peace settles over Jack at first. He wonders if this is what Amelia felt when she was writing, if it was a way to quiet the pain of losing her mom and her grandparents.
When he’s done with the first page, he unspools it and gets going on the second.
He tries to keep feeling that empathy but, the more he writes, the more that feeling of peace dissipates and instead he gets angry. Angry with God. Angry at the purposelessness of the world, at how cruel and terrible it all was and is. Angry on the page. He’s typing hard. He’s seeing the world through Nobody Boy’s eyes and it’s not the world he wanted to see. He’s laughing when the rock hits Amelia. He’s laughing when her car thunders into traffic. Jack’s crying.
So much anger and sadness. He imagines Nobody Boy’s life past that moment, not giving a shit what he’d done. If Jack can’t have revenge in life, he can have revenge on the page. He puts Nobody Boy through hell. He’s a fuckup. He has a rotten old man and a mother who won’t give him the time of day. Teachers who think he’s a piece of shit. Jack writes through the anger and comes out the other side. He starts feeling bad for Nobody Boy. All of that led him to Amelia. All of that made him throw the rock.
When Jack’s done, he pulls the second page out of the typewriter and places it under the first. He rereads it all and notices a bunch of mistakes. Typos, wonky keystrokes, wrong punctuation. He’s not sure if it’s even a story. It doesn’t look like a story. The two pages are just crowded with lines. There are no paragraphs. They look like walls of words.
He thinks about Lily. Should he be embarrassed to turn this story in to her? Is it too ugly, too raw? She seems like a nice kid. He likes the way she handled everybody in the class. He wasn’t sure what to expect from a writing teacher. When he first saw the flyer, before he talked to her on the phone, he’d imagined a guy in a sport jacket with corduroy patches on the sleeves, wearing a turtleneck under that, maybe a beard, thick-rimmed glasses. He’d seen movies with college writing classes, and the teachers were usually something like that. Big drinkers who’d let their talent wash up on the shore. Lily’s barely done being a kid. He likes her enthusiasm and kindness. She’s genuine, to boot. No trace of her being a smartass. The crew in that basement could’ve been a joke to her. She could’ve laughed her way through that meeting. Instead, she was sweet, lovely. Just as he imagined Amelia would’ve been if she’d made it that far. Not exactly, though. Amelia would’ve left room for sarcasm. She wouldn’t let the tracksuit wannabe-mobster guy, Dino, off the hook so easily. She would’ve had him pegged as a bullshitter right off.
Jack looks through his story one more time. He’s embarrassed by it. He holds the pages up and tears them lengthwise and then crumples them into a ball and tosses them into the wastebasket next to the desk.
He looks around the room. He’s trying to notice something he hasn’t noticed before. Some little detail he’s missed. A brown towel hangs from the hook on the back of the door. Amelia had used it after her shower that last morning and then hung it up to dry. It’s stiff and faded. He’s noticed that before. It’s not new to him. Nothing’s new. Nothing ever changes in here. He keeps hoping that something will change or shift, keeps hoping for some sign from Amelia. He’s not even sure he believes in that kind of thing, but he wants to. He knows that, if there’s a way, Amelia will tell him something, anything.
He decides he’ll try again with the story later. He wants to make Amelia proud. He wants Lily to be as impressed as she was with what he’d written in their first meeting. This isn’t that. He takes the Acker book, goes downstairs, and pours himself a mug of Seagram’s Seven. He flops on the couch, tries to read but drifts off to an uneasy sleep.
BOBBY
Bobby graduated high school from Our Lady of the Narrows a couple of weeks back. He’s been working for his dad’s friend Max Berry in Bay Ridge since. He’s headed to Max’s now by bus, his headphones on, listening to Supreme Clientele. He took the same bus to school every day, so it doesn’t feel too far from normal. He’d woken up late after another long night of video games and pizza and weed and music, pretty much his routine since school let out. He has a hard time getting to sleep before 4:00 A.M. these days. His dad had come home with his new girlfriend at around one thirty. Her name was Gloria or something with a G. Bobby couldn’t get his headphones loud enough to cover the sounds of them banging in the next room. He almost wanted to whack off to Gloria’s noises but his dad kept ruining it by grunting as if he was moving heavy furniture.
Sometimes Bobby feels like a loser for being nineteen and living at home with his dad. He has no interest in college and isn’t sure what else to do. The last five years have been tough. Ever since the rock he threw killed that girl, he’d stopped feeling things. He hadn’t known it was his rock until he played the scene on repeat in his mind. Zeke knew. He said he didn’t but he did. His rock was way off. They’d split as soon as the rock hit her. Bobby didn’t know it’d wound up as bad as it did until later that night when he saw the news. He didn’t cry. He just stopped feeling anything.
He and Zeke made a pact the day after it happened. They met in the alley behind Giove’s Pizza, where they sometimes drank forties and broke bottles against the wall. They agreed they’d never talk about what they did, not to each other, not to their folks or siblings or anybody. And they never did talk, as hard as it was. No one had seen them somehow. Some people on the news said they saw kids running away up the bike path but they didn’t have anything solid to go on. A kid’s not a crazed adult—it’s hard to give a solid description of two boys in the summer. They’re like fire hydrants, just there. They could’ve been any kids from the neighborhood.
It got harder not to talk when the story stayed in the news. The girl was just a few years older than them. Bobby can’t even bring himself to think her name. They saw pictures of her dad. Jack Cornacchia. He wanted to know the whole story. He was begging for information. Bobby didn’t tell Zeke this but he went to the funeral mass at St. Mary’s. Well, not to the actual mass itself, but he stood in the bank parking lot across the street and watched as they put the girl’s coffin in the hearse, watched her father collapse on the sidewalk. What could he do? He couldn’t say it was him. He couldn’t say it was an accident. It wasn’t. They knew they could do damage, but they didn’t think they could kill someone. He’s even thought about going to visit her grave, but he knows that’d be stupid.
Bobby and Zeke pretty much stopped hanging out and talking in their sophomore year. The secret had created this boiling tension between them. It was worse for Bobby. Sure, they’d both been throwing rocks, but he’d thrown the one that killed the girl. Zeke could’ve folded at any time. But he didn’t. They both wanted to forget, to pretend it wasn’t real, like it hadn’t happened. Turned out the easiest way to do that was to stop being friends. It was weird at first, but then it was normal. And it definitely helped. Zeke started dealing drugs junior year, and he was a natural. The day after graduation, Zeke moved to this little hippie college town upstate. Not to go to school in the fall or anything. Just to become a kingpin in this crunchy granola town. Bobby had heard that from Johnny Nardulli, who he bumped into on his way to Max’s one day. Johnny had become Zeke’s best pal sophomore year. He said Zeke had it all planned out, said he got the idea from some other dealer he knew and scouted out towns upstate. Johnny said that Bobby said dealing to hippies was the easy life. They were dumb and happy and had trust funds from their parents. Bobby just nodded the whole time.
Bobby’s stepmom and stepsister had bailed in ’98, and that was fine with him. They’d moved somewhere new, while he and his dad stayed in the old apartment. He never liked them much, especially Lily, who thought she was such hot shit. She went away to college in Pennsylvania or some other dumbass state. He still sees his stepmom around now and again. She lives only a couple of blocks away. He bumped into her once at an Optimo on Eighty-Sixth Street, and they caught up for forty-five minutes on the sidewalk outside. She’s not really that bad. Better than any of the women his dad’s dated since. Bobby almost told her that day that he’d been thinking a lot about committing suicide. This was late in ’99, in the middle of his junior year. It was a phase. He couldn’t stop thinking about taking pills and jumping off bridges and slashing his wrists with razors in the bathtub. Seemed to be the only thing that brought him any peace. But he didn’t tell her. Instead, he mostly just listened to her rattle on about Lily, who wanted to be a writer, blah blah blah. The suicide phase passed.
During his last couple of years of high school, every once in a while, Bobby would walk out of his way and go past Jack Cornacchia’s house to see if he could catch a glimpse of him. The last time he walked past, it was April. Jack’s place is falling apart. It’s the house of a man who’s given up. Bobby never did see Jack on any of those walk-bys. Just the house. And he thought about the girl, how she should still be alive, how she should be in college and coming home on weekends and during the summer to bring light into that shitty wreck of a house. Bobby wishes he could go back and change history. He dreams of having a time machine. He’d go back and he’d put that rock down. Better yet, he’d steer himself and Zeke away from their rock-throwing spot and push them to do something, anything else. Bowl, shoot pool, waste a million quarters on pinball, whatever.
Bobby gets off the bus on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge and walks toward Max’s office. Max and his old man had gone to high school at Our Lady of the Narrows together back in the late seventies and early eighties. Max runs some kind of “financial services” business called Options Incorporated. He also sells CDs by mail, but that might just be a front. Bobby doesn’t really understand what the guy does. It seems kind of like a bank. He gets people to invest with him, at least a grand, and then he promises them higher interest rates than the banks. Twelve or thirteen percent. He has a ton of investors. He had some problems a few years back—not being able to pay people off—but it seems to have mostly cleared up and his reputation’s on the mend.
If Max is making money, though, it doesn’t show. He drives a beater car and his office is a dive, full of overflowing file cabinets and over-stacked CD shelves. He wears cheapo eyeglasses and shirts with holes in them. He lives with his parents in a rent-controlled shithole on Third Avenue. He drinks milk. Tons of milk. There’s a safe where Max keeps some cash—Bobby’s not sure how much but a decent amount—and he’s got a gun in his desk because there have been more than a few times, he says, where his investors got pissed at him when they couldn’t get their money fast enough or at all. The last week, Bobby’s been daydreaming about robbing Max, pulling that gun out when he’s not expecting it and taking whatever’s in the safe.
Max is a big-time atheist and a big-time Republican too. A weird mix. He loves Ayn Rand books. He’s been trying to convince Bobby to read one called The Fountainhead. Bobby has evaded the big shitty-looking book repeatedly. All he likes to read is comics. The Punisher, X-Men, Batman.
Job-wise, Bobby doesn’t really do anything too complicated. He files stuff, occasionally types something up, packs CD shipments, and goes to the post office to mail them. Mostly, it just seems like Max enjoys having him around. Someone to talk with. Max tells him mob stories. He knows many mob guys, including Stacks Brancaccio, and he even knew Gentle Vic Ruggiero, back before he was gunned down on his front stoop. Bobby loves hearing all the stories. The guy who came around the day before was named Charlie French. He wasn’t a mobster per se, more of an ambitious loner according to Max, but he had a real wild card feeling about him. As soon as Charlie was out the door, Max told Bobby his whole story. How he killed his wife and got away with it and then moved to Florida and started selling guns and drugs, wound up busted and behind bars in some hothouse Florida jail for a stretch. Now he’s back, and he’s got his hands in a lot of different pies.
When Bobby knocks on the door, Max opens up almost immediately, carton of milk in hand. “There you are,” Max says at top volume so Bobby can hear him through his music. “I figured you for dead.”
Bobby presses stop on his Discman. “What do you mean?”
Max motions to the clock on the wall. “Look how late it is.”
“Sorry. I thought whenever was fine. Didn’t you say whenever was fine?”
“Yeah, but I want to take you to lunch. I’ve got to talk to you about some stuff.” Max pulls the door shut behind him, making sure it’s locked, and pushes past Bobby onto the sidewalk.
They walk down Fourth Avenue a few blocks to Max’s favorite dive pizza joint. Bobby doesn’t even know the name of the place. The sign fell off at some point, and they never put it back up. Slices are a dollar. Cheapskate Max can bring folks to lunch there and spend six or seven bucks tops.
The owner is about five feet tall with an anchor tattoo on his forearm. He wears a white paper hat. His name is Artie. The other guys who work there—there are about three of them with different shifts—are really tall. It’s a funny thing, this short guy who hires all these tall guys. It’s like he loves feeling even shorter. The pizza’s bad. Worst Bobby’s ever had in Brooklyn. Only worse pizza he ever had in his whole life was when he was in Maryland with his dad, visiting some cousins. A cousin he’d never met had graduated college. Bobby doesn’t even remember his name. Bobby’s dad stopped at some pizza parlor connected to a gas station because he didn’t trust his aunt’s cooking. The pizza tasted like a communion wafer covered in jarred sauce and bland, rubbery cheese. Artie seemed to use regular ingredients but his pizza was almost as bad. It had this funk to it Bobby couldn’t quite place. Like drinking a soda somebody ashed in.
Bobby and Max order slices from Artie. No small talk. They take a booth in the back, over by the Jurassic Park pinball machine. Artie brings them their slices on paper plates. Bobby gets a Coke from the fridge. Max knows Artie doesn’t have milk, so he doesn’t even ask. He used to, and Artie would make fun of him. “A grown man drinking milk?” he’d say. “You want it in a baby bottle?” Now, Max just gets tap water in a Styrofoam cup and only sips from if it he chokes on his pizza.
Bobby blows on his slice. “What’d you want to talk to me about?” he says, nibbling the edge. Every time he eats here, he burns his mouth.
Max folds his slice and takes a monster bite of pizza, orange grease streaming onto his paper plate. He chews noisily. Bobby’s never really noticed how big his mouth is. It seems like he could get away with cramming the whole slice in there. Max holds up his hand, signaling that he’ll talk when he’s done with this bite. He finally swallows and then dabs at his mouth with a napkin yanked from the dispenser in the center of the table. Bobby notices milk crust on his upper lip. This guy’s however old he is, in his early forties, and he’s got a goddamn milk mustache. “I’m gonna start taking you on recruiting runs,” he says.
“Recruiting runs for what?”
“For investors. That’s how it works. This person tells that person about Options Incorporated and then I go over and pitch them on it, let them know it’s legit, let them know this is the interest rate, they get monthly statements, make them feel at ease about giving me their money.”
“Is it legit?”
“It wasn’t legit, you think I’d be here right now? I’d be locked up. But I get why people think it’s a scheme, and that’s why I talk them down. ‘Start small,’ I say to them. ‘Give me a grand. See how it goes.’ They see the interest they get on that little amount, they get hungry for more. There’s no risk, only benefits, only more dough in their pockets. I want you to learn the business. I think there’s a real future for you in it. A few months maybe, things are going good, you can start making recruiting runs on your own.”
Bobby shrugs. “Okay. Cool.”
“We’ll start today. I’ve got this woman, Victoria, and her mom lined up. Victoria works with this investor of mine, Stan Caraballo. He’s been with me from the start. You’ll see him. He usually comes by once a month to make an appearance. Always picking between his teeth with a coffee straw. You know who he looks like? You ever see that show Just the Ten of Us? He’s a dead ringer for the dad, Coach Graham Lubbock.”
Bobby remembers watching Just the Ten of Us when he was about seven or eight. He watched everything. It was a spinoff of Growing Pains, which he loved, so of course he watched. He remembers having crushes on all the daughters. He can picture the actor Max is talking about just as easily as he can picture his own old man. He used to wish he had one of those TV dads, the kind who sits his kid down on the couch and talks about serious shit. “Sure, yeah, I remember that show,” he says.
“I had such a thing for Jamie Luner. She played Cindy. She was so hot. I made a shrine to her in my room. No kidding. I had all these pictures I’d cut out of magazines, and I’d light candles.”
