Love and falsehood

Chapter Three

Grandma Ursula still had eyes like chalk water, the white of albumen, and hands soft as a mattress. She gathered Dante's face in those hands of hers. 'Oh, Dante, my boy. Your father... Terrible is what it is. Just terrible.'

She was nearly a hundred, if Dante tried to count. But he did not. Grandma Ursula had been there since he was waddling in diapers, she had been there when his father was waddling in diapers too, since the beginning of time. There was no telling where she began or ended. She was one of the things in his life that had remained steady, perpetually present. Even when his mother died, she had been there for him and his father, a steady and unmoving boat, holding them in place, keeping them afloat.

Seeing her now at his father's funeral helped just a bit. She was weathered and withered, but she was a proof of something to Dante. What that was, he could not tell exactly. He let her keep him for a while until he had to disentangle himself from her to see about the funeral.

A couple of his relatives had come also. All of them olive, brown-skinned. The men had shaved heads, thick arms and thicker moustaches. In their formal clothes, they looked more like thugs than some thugs would in their street clothes, just like his father would have. The women were smallish, tough, mean-faced. They wore dresses that concealed tattoos and scrapes, burns and bruises.

Orlando, his uncle, stepped forward and stood next to him at the funeral home, while he looked down at the grey corpse they were telling him was his father, Raymond Bianchi—Black Ray. He had been shot. Mutiple times. It was as though the killer did not believe he could die—a sentiment Dante would had shared many nights before—so he put round after round into the man's body after the very first one fell him.

After lighting a cigar and taking a deep drag, Orlando said, 'Your old man liked to say, you kill by the sword, you die by it, too. I guess we never think our philosophies apply to us, eh.'

Dante stood in the silence, letting the anger that had come to stay after he found out how his father died bubble and boil under his skin. Orlando passed the blunt to him, and he took it and inhaled the smoke after a moment's hesitation.

'Somewhere in this city,' said Dante, teeth grinding against each other. 'There is a man, carrying the gun that did this. When I find him, when I find Big Jack, I will make that philosophy apply to him.'

'If you need me when the time comes, I am a phone call away.' His uncle said.

'I know, uncle. I know.'

They stood brooding, then suddenly, the burly man burst into a gale of laughter and the sound of it was very odd, especially in the gloom of the funeral home, a place brimming with body-housing boxes, the rotten smell of embalment, and depressingly insipid flowers.

'Black Ray, would flip out if he could see what you put him in, you know.' Orlando said.

Dante laughed along with him. In truth, he could only manage a bitter chuckle. He said, 'He used to say formal clothes were pretentious and—what was that word again?'

'Absurd,' Orlando finished for him, and they chuckled some more. Silence descended over them again.

'He never owned a suit.' Dante mused. 'I was always trying to get the old man to try one on. He never did. It seemed right, fitting, to get him one in the end.'

Dante looked at his uncle. Living on the man's face were his father's bottomless eyes, his anvil jaw, and his snub nose—features most of which had escaped Dante. When he looked in the mirror, it was his mother's reflection that he saw gazing back at his through the glass. Hard bones, bladed jaw, briny brown eyes, a small forehead and smatterings of brown and black in his hair.

He had always loathed how people, his relatives on his mother's particularly, would say how much he resembled her, how his jaw was hers, how he had her soft full lips, how he walked as if he was ever ready for a fight. Now it was comforting, because it meant no one looked at him and saw his father. No one mentioned any resemblance. It would have hurt too much otherwise.

The coffin was borne to the church in a sleek, gleaming limousine. The church was the same one Dante had been attending since he was old enough to remember. A slender building which was often full of sonorous music that always reminded him of his mother. A gigantic cross stood suspended at its peak. When he was little, Dante used to fear that it would fall and crush him and his family below as they crossed the church's threshold, perpetually teetering as it was. It never did fall in the end. But his family had died off anyway. His mother first, then his father following after her.

The width of the church was soon packed, full to bursting from pew to pew. The casket remained closed on the dais. People who knew his father while he lived swarmed around Dante, shaking his hands, thumping his back and whispering their condolences.

'Your father was a good man,' one man said. 'Always looked out for folks in his community. He is gone, but I have to say, you don't get more American than that.'

Dante tried to remember where he had met the man, but couldn't. A fog of anaesthesia had settled over his mind. His father must have liked the man, the sort that said you were 'American' instead of saying you were patriotic. He would snorted, chortled, chuckled. American, he would have said, shaking his head from side to side.

Throughout the funeral, Dante stayed silently, his hand curved around his Grandma's, her knuckles lying safely inside the arch of his palm. His face was tight, as was hers. Every Bianchi there was the same—hardfaced. Tears were meant for indoors, his father once told his mother. It was years before, when Dante was still in high school, scrawny and bushy-haired, but he remembered the memory vividly. His father was in the kitchen, leaning over the counter Dante would later inherit, telling his mother about a man who burst into tears on the sidewalk after receiving a phone call. He was shaking his head from side to side as he said it. Tears are meant for indoors, he said. His mum looked up from the bowl of butter and sugar she had been mixing with a spatula. She smiled at him. Sunlight was pouring through the window like golden rain. It made the spun gold in her hair glint

'Ray-Ray,' she said. 'How we react to pain differs. You cannot dictate it. If we could, we would not even be human anymore. We would all just be tough, good-looking men walking around with big moustaches and no emotions.'

'You think I am good-looking?' His father asked.

'If I did not, I would not be married to you, silly.' She flicked the spatula at him and butter flecked his arm. He lunged at her, laughing, and she in turn, dodged him easily. Their mirth filled the house. Dante took his homework and retreated to his room, appalled. He always shied away when they began going at it like teenagers.

Sitting in his tailored suit at the funeral, Dante wished he had stayed more often. He wished he had shared in their laughter. He wished more than anything that they were still there with him, his moustachioed father and his golden mother, dancing around the enormous living room, in front of the enormous fireplace.

They drove behind the limosuine to the cemetry, a procession of dark cars and tinted windows. The mafia was there, and like his uncle, conspicuous in their suits and evening shirts, gold scarves tied around their necks, fat rings bedecking their fingers. But they stuck to the edges of the gathering, like shadows minding the light.

Dante was numb until someone put a shovel into his hand. He tossed down a shovelful of black soil into the square hole into which they had lowered his father, and as the dirt rained down upon the hardwood, violent rage raced upwards, roaring into his chest and ears.

His fingers coiled round the metal tighter than a boa around tree trunk. He wished he could find the man that had done it, lay open his skin with the blade of that shovel.

But for now, he could not. He could not find escape in revenge. He could only wait, wait until a tine came when he could hunt the one responsible for this without reservation. For now, he only had to remember the name of the man he had to kill, the man who killed his father.

Big Jack, his father second and bosom friend: Jack Maeto.

—

It was the afternoon after graduation night that Jackie finally saw the numerous calls on her phone. They were all from her father. On her phone, she had saved his name as Big Jack, the moniker everyone knew him by. It was amusing sometimes, how the name made him sound impressive and colossal, but it was she, a six year old with eyes like white oil and lips like cramped petals, who started calling him that when she was younger. If she was Little Jack, then he was Big Jack. The name stuck.

Her mouth tasted of vileness when she awoke. It was bright outside, a watery, egg-yolk sun hovering above, its light spilling through the shutters, weakly. Her eyes were still swimming from all the liquor she had drank the night before when she saw them, the missed calls lighting her phone. She had picked the device to check what the time was. Jackie made to toss the phone back onto the mattress before she noticed the notifications.

She ran to the toilet to throw up, and afterwards when she had flushed the swirling yellow down the bowl, she sat in the toilet and called him back, and immediately, her father took the call.

'Jack?' His voice filtered through the line, hard and big.

'Dad,' she said, tiredly.

'Little Jackie,' he said. 'How I have missed your voice.' When he said little, he made the word sound like a contraction, like the ts and es had been taken out and replaced with pockets of air.

'You know what else you missed Dad?'

'Your graduation.' He sighed.

'That, and my valedictorian speech, Dad.' She ground out, very annoyed. 'Or should I say Big Jack.'

As usual, he seemed apologetic. 'I couldn't make it, Jackie. Something came up.'

'No shit.' Jackie said automatically, dispassionately.

She was propped up on her elbows in bed. Joaquin was sprawled across Cindy's bed, his face pushed into the fluffy mattress and sheets. Cindy would flip out if she saw him that way. For all her terrible hygiene habits, her ever-existent piles of dirty laundry, her untidy toenails, she took particular importance to her bed. No one but her came anywhere near it. Jackie only hoped she would not barge in now, while she was on call with her absentee father. He would flip out.

Big Jack had wanted to rent her an apartment off campus, intimidatingly huge, as huge as their mansion back home in New York, the home she rarely ever visited. The apartment he showed her had wine coloured floorboards that spoke of regular scrubbing, red brick walls and a sweeping garden outdoors. A place she could fall in love with. But she refused it all. She did not want his Mafia money, his blood money. That was what she said to him. But she still let him pay the tuition fees, and it felt like a miniscule betrayal of herself.

Her father had joined the Mafia when she was young, quite young, just emerging from the phase of strollers and diapers, and her mother had never quite forgiven him. She died before she could forgive him. But her absolution was of just as little consequence as Jack's was. It was his blood money that had bought them the gigantic mansion in Brooklyn. It was, again, his blood money that had paid for her mother's chemotherapy and medication when she started going wiry and bald, her body thinning like a herd of cattle in drought, her hair coming off in enormous clumps of pale yellow when she brushed it.

Jackie often found herself wondering if her mother ever felt like she was betraying herself, allowing him take care of her, knowing what he now did for a living. She did not even know what he did herself. She only knew it was dirty work, gang affiliated, and he had always kept her out of it, pushing her away even further after her mother passed. It was a small kindness. But it was also a great price to pay, because for all the money, all the new cars parked in their garage, bodies shining from burnishing, all the tailored black suits in his closet, he had somewhere along the line lost the more simple, most essential parts of him. The parts of him that cared about things such as graduations and weddings, and daughters.

Now, he told her over the phone it would be best if she remained in San Diego for the time. It was safer, he said. Brooklyn was getting wilder by the day, he said.

'Things are not what they used to be, Jackie. Everywhere you look now, there's fighting, killing. It would be sensible if you stayed out there for a while, at least until things cool down here.' He said.

Jackie had never been in a hurry to return to New York. Ever. She spent most of her holidays in San Diego, taking up menial jobs that would have made her father's jaw drop if he saw her. Brooklyn, its red bricks and gray walls, its cold wind and sparse trees, everything about it reminded her of her mom. Certain memories, she had discovered, were not meant to be relived. The tears only brought more tears and so did the laughter. Big Jack had never protested her absence, but now, there was a new property in his voice. An emotion that was entirely alien to Big Jack: fear.

Jackie sat upright in bed. 'Dad? Did something happen?' She knew something had. She could hear his voice tell it. But she also knew was that he would deny it.

And he did exactly that. 'It is fine, Jackie' he said. 'Everything is perfectly fine. Though, I will be leaving town for a while. Just a little while. Until things cool down a bit, like I said.'

'If everything was fine, why are you skipping town, dad?' She asked, dubious. Then without waiting for him to give a reply, Jakie added, 'is someone after you? Are you running?'

Her heart was between the walls of her mouth, palpitating painfully hard. But he chuckled. 'Still the same old Jackie with the million questions, huh? I told you, everything is just fine.'

As much as she did not completely believe him, Jack felt better at the reassurance in his voice. He always had that effect on her. It was not relevant how many birthdays he missed. How many Christmases, how many graduations, whenever there was news of shooting in New York she worried about him, even if it was miles away from Brooklyn. There was always a chance he was in the thick of it, fighting, or dying, neither of which she felt particularly comfortable with.

Now, she realized she missed him terribly, the musical baritone of his voice, the perpetual smell of garden on him, regardless of how many tall bottles of overpriced perfume he bathed in, the smiling with only a corner of his mouth.

'I have missed you too, Dad.' She admitted

A corner of his lips would be twitching, slicing across his face in a smile, she knew.

'I know, chile,' he said. 'I know.'

There was a small moment of silence on the line, and then he began to say something before he was interrupted by a loud, hollow sound. The echo of a gunshot. Then two. Then more.

'Dad!' Jackie cried, jerking out of bed. No answer came.

The line went static. Then it died, leaving the ringing noise of phantom bullets in Jackie's ears.