Headstone City Read Free

difficult. If only he'd cared a little more and been a lot smarter. He shouldn't have been so pathetic, but that's what the familiar streets had done to him. What he'd allowed them to do. What they were still doing, even in prison.
    “Will you visit me in Headstone City?” she asked.
    “I don't think so. It's best if I'm not seen there.”
    “You live there.”
    “I mean at your grave.”
    “Nobody visits. They act like they miss me so much, but nobody takes the time to say a prayer or bring a shitty plastic flower.”
    “I'm sorry, Angie.”
    “Johnny, I need you.”
    Something began to soften in his belly then, and he felt himself going with it. A weakness that had always been there but was broadening, intensifying. Maybe he was about to cut loose with a sob. Twenty minutes ago he was almost ready to cut throats, and now this fragility and brittleness. He wanted to ask her if she held him responsible the way her family did. It was a question he'd never asked her before. She didn't appear to want to make him feel guilty, didn't try to get her claws into him, the way she had in life.
    Dane heard the bull coming for him, turned to watch as the guard stepped up to the cell door. “Danetello. Let's go.”
    He stood and the guard escorted him down the tier, through the gen pop, across the courtyard, and back into the visitation quad, where all the new cons first set foot in the can. The warden was nowhere to be seen. They handed him a ream of paperwork, but nothing for him to sign. The clothes he came in with had been pressed and folded into a pile that lay on the counter. He reached for them, and another guard said, “Hold it.”
    “What's the matter?”
    “You've got a phone call, if you want it.”
    “Why wouldn't I want it?”
    “Most cons who get this close to the outside on the day of their release don't turn around and go answer the phone.”
    Dane figured it was his Grandma Lucia, jonesing for sugar. He went back and took the call. His grandmother said, “Stop off at the bakery and get some
cannoli
and
biscotti,
will you, Johnny? And don't let the girl put you off. She's dead, that one. She doesn't know what she's talking about.”

 
    TWO
     
    T his town, it took your blood and replaced it with cement, asphalt, and pigeon shit. You became a part of it as much as the steel and iron, all the bone meal sprinkled into its cornerstones. No matter who you were, you got hard.
    Brooklyn, New York.
    Fourth largest city in the United States, cradle of roughnecks and Nobel Laureates, center of America's most diversified gathering of angry cultures.
    You knew it, and it knew you. Every dark corner, edge to edge. Handball and knock-hockey in Highland Park. Nights sleeping in a tent under Stoney Bridge out near the reservoirs. Stickball on Schenck Avenue, the street tar on top of the old cobblestones getting soft in the August sun. You could lift it with a spoon. Watching a parade curbside on Flatbush Ave. Playing pinball and having an egg cream at Louie's candy store. A shot of syrup, a dollop of milk, and a steady stream of seltzer. The foam would rise to the rim of the glass but never overflow.
    Louie wearing a black merchant marine wool cap, even in the summer, never taking any shit off the kids. Once, Roberto Monticelli walked in and, because his voice had changed and he'd grown a few inches that year, tried to get protection money out of Louie. Kept making vague threats about arson, using a big word like “accelerant” and asking,
Hey, anybody smell smoke?
Louie smacked him in the mouth, took him outside, pried up a manhole cover with a tire iron, and threw Berto down into the sewer. About the funniest thing Dane had ever seen in his life.
    The Don never came after Louie for retribution. You didn't fuck with the corner candy stores. They meant too much to the neighborhood.
    A century ago Headstone City had been known as Meadow Slope, one of the richest areas in Brooklyn. Industrial-age barons, moguls, and