Deadpools

Deadpools
about 5,400 words

by Dale L

Every eye on the beach gaped as the newcomers climbed off their boat. Every fisherman looked up from his reel. Every bored sunbather turned in their direction. All of them forgot whatever business had delivered them to this desolate slice of shoreline and studied the new arrivals, struggling to keep their glances from taking obvious shape.
There was no dispassion in their looks. No eye liked what it saw. The young watchers just shook their heads. The men groaned and murmured and whispered to themselves sour words, though some threw up laughs that chilled the blood of those who did not see a joke. The women pressed their lips, gripped their fists, and gazed at the spectacle with the malevolence that only comes from perfect understanding.
Everyone looked at the newcomers, and everyone knew that the newcomers were exactly what they looked like. The man would have been taken as the girl’s father, perhaps grandfather, if it weren’t for the undaughterly bikini briefs that wrapped around her perfect thighs and the unfatherly way he watched her as she walked. Even if the briefs were overlooked, the girl’s breasts were clearly made by a professional for a professional. The combination of her appearance and his smile worked on the imaginations of those who saw them with unpleasant results.
This section of the island received only a few visitors. It was far away from any protected beach, boardwalk, amusement park, or other sign of Jersey Shore civilization. In a rebuke to the real estate developers who rule most of this part of the world, the State had taken a generous chunk of land from the farthest edge of the farthest peninsula. Now it was a protected reserve where the woods and the weeds were left to thrive. The newcomers, like most of those who gawked at them, were boaters who had wedged their vessel onto the bay side beach, then ventured to the ocean side. They came to spend a day in the sun without fighting the summer crowds.
Though the couple had a large audience, none spied the man that stayed on their boat. Sitting low, nearly beneath the prow, this unseen newcomer bit his cheek as he peered over the wooden rail. He was at work, and he would not let the ocean or the lowering sun affect his working concentration. His attention would never leave the girl and the man, though his eyes would often search the other beach-goers for people who, like him, did not come here to relax. The only motion he allowed himself was his left hand rubbing the small of his back, adjusting the handgun that was kept there.
The girl danced along the shore, pulling the man forward with her movements. Bubbling laughter, she swung the canvas bag at her side, covering his path with her footsteps, twisting back and around to make sure he was keeping up. She knew her body, knew the excitement it could inflict, and he liked the wounds she made. As fast as his heavy feet could manage, he followed, swaying back and forth under the burden of two folding chairs that hung from his arms. They took their gleeful parade down the beach, until the girl found the stink.
She slumped, weighed down by disgust. The man caught up to her soon, and stopped when he saw her face.
“What is it?” asked the man, sucking in the air in front of them.
She pointed to a ridge of sand that stood a few feet ahead. He peered past it, and saw a pond of seawater that had been cut off from ocean. For hours, the man guessed, the water had lain on the beach, open to the sun and the dry wind. “It’s a deadpool,” said the girl.
He walked toward the pond, through the smell of old death. Black and orange somethings squished beneath his feet as he approached the bank, then the water broke into ripples as his sneakers pushed inside the basin. “It’s warm,” he said, pumping his weight up and down, like a child discovering his knees, laughing as the little waves spread to the corners of the pond. “Why is it warm?”
“It’s not part of the ocean anymore,” said the girl. “It’s rotten.”
“It tickles,” said the man.
She turned for the edge of the pool, her mouth agape to keep the wicked fumes from her nose. Tracing an arc around the mocking pulse of his ripples, she finally came to a stretch of soft, dry sand. “There’s diseases in there,” she called. “Seriously.”
His once-white shoes soaked through, the man sloshed his way toward her. With each new step, he lifted his feet higher, higher, until sheets of yellow water leapt into the air as he passed. Laughing at his work, he crossed the pool, his legs kicking like a toy soldier in a cartoon. “I’ve never seen this,” he said.
“It’s all dead,” said the girl from her dry shelter. “Crabs and fish and shit get caught in there when the tide goes out, then they all suffocate and dissolve into that yellow stuff.”
The man stumbled up the little bank of sand, still giddy from his adventure. Holding her nose, she peered at him, as if waiting for some kind of explanation. He walked past without a word.
They did not speak as they continued their walk, side by side, the man chuckling to himself now and then, the girl trying her best to draw his attention to her frown. She became so annoyed that she finally pulled a towel from her bag and sat, forcing the man to stop suddenly and lower himself, uninvited, to her side.
On the balance, though, they had a nice afternoon together. He propped his sneakers upright so they would dry, then dozed. She sat reading a book, lay for an hour upon the sand, and took a single swim in the ocean. He watched her often, recording her movements through a pair of dark sunglasses. Still they did not speak.
“Marty,” the girl finally began. All day she had gone over this speech in her head. “I think I’m going to quit the Club.”
“Good,” said Marty.
She waited for him to go on, hoping he would. “My Mom and Dad said they’d pay for me to go back to school.”
“Is there someplace that will take your credits from the Community College?”
“A couple of places.”
“You’ll feel old there.” Only Marty’s lips moved.
“I know.” The girl shivered, wishing she had found a time when she was clothed to begin this talk. Her body was the only tool of the only trade she knew. She used it to overpower men, to make them hungry and stupid, to open their wallets for just a few more hours. Marty, however, was never stupid or overpowered, no matter how hungry he became. She wished she’d remembered that.
“What will you do when you have finished your school?”
“I’m going to be a teacher.” She belted the sentence from her chest. It was time to be a little defiant.
The gray whiskers on Marty’s face spread into a smirk. “My little Tina is going to be a teacher?”
“Yes.”
“You will give the little boys dreams that they have never had,” he chuckled.
“I’ll be the one they’re afraid of,” said Tina. “I’ll punish one at random every day so they know who’s boss.”
“And you will not come see me anymore,” said Marty.
“No.” Tina did not hear as much courage in her voice as she had hoped, but it was enough.
“I will miss you.”
Tina did not know if it was true. “I don’t want to be this way my whole life,” she said. “I don’t want to live this way forever.”
“What is so bad about the way you live?” said Marty.
“I have fun with you, Marty,” said Tina. “But I need more.”
“You need what?” said Marty. “Blonde, football-playing husband. Kids before you’re twenty five?”
“Marty,” Tina said, biting her words. “You call me at eight and say be ready by nine, take me to dinner, pop a few blue pills and fuck me, and I don’t hear from you for two weeks.”
“You like the restaurants. You like the dresses I buy.”
“Yes.”
“You like the jewelry.”
“I’ll trade some of my jewelry if you call me a day before you take me out.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Marty was not at all angry, which made Tina furious.
“Then why shouldn’t I want more,” she said.
“Because you’re happy the way things are.”
“I’m a whore.” The fact came out of Tina without her thinking about it.
“Yes,” said Marty, “and you’re happy being a whore.”
“Don’t tell me what makes me happy, Marty,” she spat.
“You’re so young,” he said, grinning. His sunglasses slipping down his nose, he grabbed a fistful of sand. It was the first time all day he had allowed his hands to get dirty. The dusty clumps fell between his fingers. “You know what I was doing at your age?”
“Were you dancing in a nightclub with a thong up your ass?”
“No,” said Marty. “ I was driving a truck.”
“A truck?” said Tina.
“You thought I was always a big shot?”
“Yes.” She told the truth. Marty without money and power was unimaginable.
“I wasn’t,” he said. “I lived over a pool hall. That was just a few miles from here, actually.”
“No,” said Tina. “I cannot see that.”
“I lived over a pool hall,” he started again, softly, as if reciting an old poem, “and I drove a truck. A vegetable truck. Back and forth between the farms in Jersey and the stores in Philadelphia.”
“You weren’t a. . .” she stopped and put the extra emphasis in her voice that always amused him, “businessman then?”
“Tradition, Tina,” said Marty. “Call it the Tradition. No. My father made me promise not to join any of the gangs in America.” Marty never spoke about his life this way. Though Tina knew many people who worked for him, and had seen much of his “business,” she was still a little frightened to be talking about it baldly.
“Your father wasn’t. . .” she stopped again, “in the Tradition?”
Marty laughed. “Oh, he was. He just thought the Napolitans were ruining it in America.”
“The Napolitans?”
“He was an old Sicilian,” said Marty. “Anyway, it was a different time. These things were a very big deal. He made me promise, so when I came over here, I became a truck driver.”
“Why a truck driver?”
“Because it was Heaven.” Marty pulled back in his chair, the first time since he sat that he seemed truly at ease. “I got up every morning singing. People talk about fresh air in the country. In a truck, you gorge yourself on fresh air. It comes at you as fast as you want it. Every few minutes, I had a new sky. It was like going to sea, except without the fucking salt getting in your eyes.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Fuck you,” he shot. “You know, the trucks back then weren’t like the trucks now. You really had to know how to drive back then. The wheel would fight you when you tried to turn. The brakes would go in and out whenever they felt like it. Your transmission would fall out sometimes, right in the middle of the highway. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.”
“So,” Tina began, trembling, “you joined the. . . Tradition. . . because it was safer?”
“I didn’t want to be safe,” said Marty. “It was a great job. Paid me all I needed to live, and no one was around to yap at me to work harder or do it differently than I wanted to.”
“Then why did you give it up?”
“I lost a bet one night in a card game,” said Marty, lying deeper in his beach chair.
“You are blowing my mind today,” said Tina. “You used to gamble?”
“Young men do these things. Anyway, I lost more money than I could pay, so a friend of mine gave me a way to work it off. I worked for him at night, and I still had time to drive my truck during the day. God I loved that truck.”
“What were you doing?”
“You see,” said Marty, “all over Philadelphia, they were renovating the houses that had been built in the old days. Most of them went up without permanent stoops.”
“Stoops?” said Tina.
“You’re such a suburban girl,” said Marty. “The stairs in front of a building. The stoop. When I first came over, all the rowhouses had wooden staircases that had to be replaced every few years. After the War, Mussolini is dead, people over here are flush with money, they think they’re entitled to something better, so they begin making marble and stone stoops. It was a big status symbol for a few years.”
“So you built stoops at night?”
“Oh no,” said Marty. “There’s no reason to build stoops at night. Me and my friend just stole them.”
“You what?”
“Frankie was a mason. It took him an hour to show me how. When you chisel the bottom just right, up comes the stoop, all on in one piece.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Only hard part is lifting it and getting it into the pickup truck without waking the people who live there.”
“Oh my God.”
Marty was clearly enjoying his memories. “Sometimes, we came back after sunrise to watch the people fall as they came out their doors.”
“Oh my God!”
“Nobody ever looked. They just came straight out and. . . Boom. Frankie and I would laugh at them so hard. Most times, they would laugh too.”
“Would they know it was you?” said Tina.
“We were two dirty guys in a pickup truck watching an empty street at five o’clock in the morning,” said Marty. “Of course they knew.”
“Were they mad?”
“Not usually,” said Marty. “Most times they waved.”
“They waved!?”
“The City was a much more civilized place back then,” said Marty. “Besides, when we worked in South Philly, we were working with our neighbors. In those days, you were left to deal with Your Own as you thought best.”
“But you said you lived in Jersey.”
“It didn’t matter,” said Marty. “I was Italian, and I was always in the neighborhood. I was Marcello, who drove the vegetable truck. Everybody knew me.” He leaned forward again and dragged his hand in the sand. “That was how I got in trouble.”
“With the cops?”
“Nobody,” said Marty in a severe voice, “nobody would go to the cops. They were paid off anyway. Besides, most of them were Irish. No. I got into trouble with Slow Joe.”
“Sounds like a retarded guy who hangs out in a bowling alley.”
“Retarded Slow Joe was not,” said Marty. “He was the Boss, back when the rackets were run by men and not boys.”
“And he wasn’t getting his cut?” said Tina.
“Don’t say ‘cut,’ Tina.” He sounded disappointed. “It’s not a pie that you share with your friends at a picnic. Different people have their own interests, and they have their own people to protect. When one is fortunate, one shows proper respect by passing on what others deserve.”
“And you didn’t show Joe the proper respect?”
“Hell no,” said Marty. “We didn’t think he’d notice.”
“So you got caught.”
“I’d prefer not to dwell on this part of the story.”
“Like a dog at the toilet bowl.”
“Don’t interrupt,” Marty grumbled. “I have a point here.”
“It’s not ‘Don’t get caught?’”
“I would have thought you knew that one already,” he said. “Anyway, because my father was of the Tradition, I was told to meet with Slow Joe so that I could answer for myself and for my friend.”
“Did he call you to one of those darkened rooms like in the movies?”
“No,” said Marty. “He called me to a candy store. Joe had business to do all over. He wasn’t going to make a special trip to see me. Kept me waiting three hours before he came, too, which was only right.” His hand still rolling in the sand, Marty stared deep into the ground as he spoke. “I can’t tell you what it was like for me to meet that man. People spoke of him like he was a general. Like a Roman Consul. I’ve done pretty good for a little sidgy in a big world, but he. . .” He shook his head. “He was a man who mattered.” Looking down, Marty seemed to notice for the first time that his hand was covered in sand. He brushed it on his pants and continued.
“As soon as he came in the room, I knew why they called him Slow Joe. He had a big gut, and a flabby face, that just kind of bobbed through the room. It took him a whole minute to straighten his tie, and he didn’t even notice that these heavy, black glasses were crooked on his nose. His hands kept tugging at his clothes; big, ugly hands. It didn’t look like he could do anything with them if he’d wanted to.”
“But you still knew to respect him,” said Tina. “You saw he was a great man.”
“Yes.”
“Probably even fell a little bit in love with him.”
“Yes,” said Marty, “but I was still afraid. I knew he might find me inconvenient, even if my father was of the Tradition.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He walked over and he said ‘Why do you want to be a whore?’
“I said, ‘But Don Giuseppe, I am not a whore.’ I don’t think many people addressed him in the old-fashioned way, because he smiled a little. ‘You do bad things, and you benefit only yourself,’ he said. ‘That makes you a whore.’ I almost exploded. I wanted to tell this man about my father, and my grandfather, in Sicily. I wanted to show this old man that even though I was young and small, I had something in me that even he would respect, that even he couldn’t tear down with his eyes and his God-damned glasses.
“But I said nothing. ‘Come,’ he said to me. ‘Let me show you what a man looks like.’ He took me to the window, and pointed across the street. I could see the man he meant as soon as I looked.”
“Somebody you robbed,” said Tina.
“Yes,” said Marty. “Joe said it was the brother of his priest. A tall man, with an old-style mustache. He had on an apron, so he must have been a bartender or something. His face looked like he hadn’t slept, and his legs looked like they were about to collapse. A hard-working man. A good man.”
Tina rested her calves, stretching her feet into the cool, soft sand. “That must have been terrible for you.”
“It was the most humiliating time of my life,” he said. “I wanted to die. I wanted to fly away like a bird. I wanted to get in my truck and drive, drive, drive, and never stop. I was just a pitiful little creature, bothering men like Joe with my useless, worthless. . .” Tina had never seen Marty tremble before. “Anyway, I felt bad.”
“Because you knew he saw it,” said Tina. “He saw how you felt about yourself.”
“Yes,” said Marty. “He saw that I was a whore, and I had to stand in front of him like that, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I was so young,” said Marty. “I thought I was waiting for my punishment. I thought that’s how it worked. They made you feel bad about yourself, and then they shot you, but Joe knew I was waiting for something else.”
“For what?” said Tina.
“For him to save me,” said Marty. “Which he did. He said I could repay my debts if I started doing things for him, along my truck route.”
“What kind of things?”
“What you’d expect. Actually, I should have been very flattered. He gave me things that had to be done away from his usual partners. Discreet things. Dropping brown envelopes to the cops. Picking them up from restaurants and building sites. Just the work for a smart, completely terrified young man.”
“Sounds okay,” said Tina.
“It was,” said Marty. “I wasn’t in trouble with Joe, and I was still paying off my card debt from what he was paying me. He even let us keep taking up the stoops, as long as we gave him his share, and made sure we kept away from his friends’ houses.”
Tina smiled. “You weren’t a whore anymore.”
“That’s right,” said Marty. “For the first time in my life, I felt like a man. I was in the Tradition, like my father. Important men depended on me, and I didn’t disappoint. I was very happy.”
“I’ll bet,” said Tina. “And I’ll bet you were running half of Jersey in a year.”
“Oh no. It was years before I was running anything. But I did take advantage of whatever my new friends could help me with. Little bit of real estate, you know, people were putting houses up all the time back then. Couple friends and I built a diner. Used to be the only place you could eat between Philly and the Shore. That was a big deal.”
“You were finally living for yourself,” said Tina. “You were free to build things that could make you proud.”
“Yes,” said Marty.
She leaned over and patted him on the thigh. Her bubbly laugh poured into his lap. “You figured out what it was that Joe couldn’t take away from you.”
“I thought so,’ said Marty. His voice creaked under his memories. “For years, I thought so. That’s why I gave up my truck.”
“You didn’t have time for it?”
“That was part of the reason,” said Marty. “Joe got me big into construction. I had a lot of things going on, but that wasn’t the main reason.” Tina almost never thought of Marty as old, but as he spoke, his words were coming slower, and the blood seemed to be leaving his face. “They started making fun of me. Marcello the Farmboy, they called me, because I mostly delivered vegetables. It was, you know, the way young men talk to one another, but, in the Tradition, especially in America, these things make a difference. People start to look at you differently. They don’t stay quiet sometimes when you’re talking. They don’t move so quick when you tell them to move.”
“Did it make a difference to Joe?”
“No,” said Marty. “Joe never once mentioned it, but, you know, he bothered me most of all.”
“Why.”
“The people Joe introduced me to, the people who worked for him, were big, important men. They talked about great things. Politics, businesses that affected thousands of people. It was very hard for me to come from my little truck and go and speak to these men who owned a hundred trucks between them.”
“You felt small,” said Tina. “Like they knew everything and you knew nothing.”
“I suppose,” said Marty. “Anyway, back to the point.”
“Good,” said Tina. “I was worried.”
“Did you ever meet Paolo Corrone down at the Club? Skinny guy. Even older than me.”
“No.”
“Okay guy,” said Marty. “Retired to Florida a couple of years ago. He goes back to Joe. Anyway, one day, the word comes down that I should be allowed to take the next step.”
“What’s that mean?”
“More Old World stuff that used to be important. The point is, Joe has a big job that needs to be done and I am supposed to help Paolo do it”
“Seriously,” said Tina, “are you going to have to kill me after you tell this story.”
“No,” said Marty. “Don’t interrupt. Paolo, who’s a real prick in those days, has me pick him up in my Dodge. He gives me directions to this dirt road in the middle of nowhere.”
“Where?”
“South Jersey. Not far from here, probably. For two hours, we sit there, not even on the road really. We were in the woods, sitting there, smoking, and not talking. For a while, I wondered if Paolo really knew what was going on or if he forgot and started faking. Few minutes later, a car comes rolling up from the highway, a big, nice car, too good for a farmer, or for almost anybody way out in the country.
“So Paolo wasn’t faking. I wait for a second. Of course I think Paolo’s about to tell me to do something. ‘Follow him,’ or ‘take the license plate,’ or something, but he just keeps sitting there, smoking his cigarette. We got the lights off, so the other car doesn’t see us. It rolls past, down the road, and out of sight. I’m starting to get scared. I’m thinking that any minute, a carload of guys is going to come out of the bushes and start blasting, but Paolo’s still not moving.
“Finally, I see the car coming back. Still doesn’t see us, just goes right by, back to the highway. Now Paolo says ‘go.’ I start to pull out, following the other car, but he yells at me and points out to the woods, where the car came from. I’m more than a little jumpy now, and I’m trying to think of a way I can get back at Paolo when we’re done what we’re doing, but I go. He must have been there before, because he’s giving me all these twists and turns before we finally get to the spot.”
“What was it?’
“Mound of dirt,” said Marty. “That’s all I can see from my seat. Paolo tells me to get out and turn the motor off, but to keep the lights on so that we can see what we’re doing. I get out. Paolo’s pulled a couple of shovels out of somewhere, lays one in my hand, tells me to follow him. At first, I think we’re about to steal from somebody’s garden, some special turnip that Joe can flip on the street for a few grand to some weird turnip restaurant or something, but then it hits me. All at once, it hits me. I know it even before I see the little brown bundle next to the dirt.”
“You were burying a body,” said Tina.
“Oh,” said Marty. “It’s never as simple as burying a body when it’s for Slow Joe. Paolo ignores the bundle, tells me to start filling the hole.”
“Without the body?”
“Yup,” said Marty. “We leave it sitting there for an hour while we shovel all the dirt back into the hole. It was a pretty cool night, but Paolo and me both start sweating about halfway into it. It was almost hard to hold onto the shovels.” He looked into his lap as he spoke. “The whole time I can feel the bundle on my right,” he said, twisting his shoulder behind him, as if carrying a weight. “I can feel it even though I haven’t seen it up close yet. I’m trying to think if it’s somebody I know. I knew a lot of people that could have gotten into trouble with Joe back then. I don’t know if I was thinking of anybody specific. I don’t even know if I really would have cared, but I felt like I needed to open that bag and see who was inside. Like Paolo and Joe were keeping something from me.
“We finish the hole, and Paolo tells me to grab the bundle. It’s burlap and rope, so I don’t know which end is which until we pick it up and it bends at the waist.” Marty coughed, but held his mouth and stopped himself. Tina knew by the way he hid his face that he had shown her more than he meant to. “It made me sick,” he continued, slowly. “The whole time, I was praying that Paolo doesn’t say anything, because I know that if he does, I’m going to lose it before we can get the guy into the trunk.
“I got lucky, though. Not only does Paolo not say anything, he gets into the driver’s seat before I do and he takes us to the new spot. I found out that was a trick Joe used a lot. One crew to kill a guy and put him where they think he’s going to get buried, then another crew to take him to another hole in the ground. If anybody talks to the cops, nobody knows the whole story.”
“Did you ever find out who it was?” said Tina.
“We were digging the new hole,” said Marty, “which takes a lot longer than the first one because we’ve got to dig it all ourselves. You know, it’s worse now, because I’ve touched it, and I can’t stop thinking about who it is, and what they did to make Joe kill them. Paolo would never have let me look, and he might put me in the hole if he thought I’d tried, but I can’t shake this feeling.” He grit his teeth together like an animal. “Finally, Paolo goes into the woods for a piss.
“For just a second, I want to lie in the hole myself, but I don’t. I run up to the bundle, trying to listen for Paolo’s footsteps like I’m a fucking Apache or something, and I undo just a little bit of burlap where I’d been carrying it. My hands are shaking, my knees want to hug the ground. I swear, my heart stops, like it doesn’t want to be around if Paolo comes back. I put my hands under the burlap, and I drag my knuckles across that cold, rubbery skin, and I see the man’s face.”
Tina tried not to look at him. She didn’t want Marty to know that she was interested in his story. Even that would have been too much power to give away today. “We should think about getting back,” he said after a few minutes. “It’s getting late.”
“Who was it?” said Tina, feeling like she’d lost a game.
“The priest’s brother,” said Marty.
“Oh my God,” said Tina. “Why would Joe do that?”
“Never got the full story,” said Marty.
“Did you ever ask?”
“That would have been considered bad etiquette,” said Marty. “I thought Joe would tell me the next time I saw him. You know, some little hint about the ‘why,’ or the ‘who to,’ but nothing. He did mention it, but it was just to acknowledge what I had done, not to give me any details. He got this little, little smile when he said it. This little pleased, little satisfied smile. Like he just ate a good fig. Like he just drank a good wine. Like he just had a good whore.”
Orange had overtaken the sky. Tina watched as Marty stared into the sand, then asked him a question she had never thought to ask him about anything ever before. “How did that make you feel?”
“I felt alone,” said Marty. “I felt like I did on the boat to America. I didn’t know any of the people around me. They were like this sand.” He scooped up a fistful. “The more I tried to grab onto them, the more they fell away from me. The whole world looked dead. Somebody had got there first and used up all the good parts.”
She did not want to face him as he looked through her into the years gone by. She felt it would have been rude. “I wanted my truck back,” Marty said. “I wanted all those quiet, empty days on the road. I wanted my youth. I wanted my joy, but it was gone. I was ashamed of my joy, so I gave it away.”
They spoke not at all on the way back to the boat. Tina did not pause as they passed the deadpool again. It was just another pocket of air on the ocean’s endless breath. She tasted it with her tongue for the first time, and it was not pleasant, but it was real. It almost tasted sweet, which made her laugh.