The Accidental Pallbearer Read Free Page A

lightning-quick non sequitor, the sexy, thirty-something interviewer asks Pavarotti what he does mid-aria if he needs to clear his throat. I do nothing. Nothing? I do nothing because I do not sing from the throat. Like a baby produces the voice, I sing. Are you understanding? Even when the baby cries for ten hours without stopping, no soreness of the throat.
Perché
? Because the baby produces the voice from here, darling, supported from here, below, where the true voice is born. He puts his hand on the interviewer’s diaphragm in illustration. It slips lower. (She suppresses the urge, she’ll wait until after the interview, to ask him if her true voice is born in her vagina.) When we grow we lose nature. We talk and sing dangerous, from the throat. Pavarotti places his huge hand on her warm throat, his pinky drifting down and finding her breast. I have career like atomic bomb.
Perché
? Because Luciano big baby. Luciano is nature.
Capisci, mia figa stretta
?!
    The daddy slaps the baby very hard, three times, on the face. Conte, unable to escape, glances over at the man, who catches his glance and responds with a glare and the middle finger. Conte is afraid. Conte is a timid man. He gives the man the thumbs-up sign and says, “I don’t blame you, not in the least.”
    The rumble of the train in motion and the crying and slapping fill the car like white noise and Conte is seized by the moment that had earned him his expulsion from UCLA, when he’d felt taken over, when he’d become a vessel for rage, when he’d dangled the provost, all five feet four of him, by the ankles out of the provost’s fifth-floor office window. “By the heels, like Mussolini in Milan,” he’d whispered over and over again. (“That wasn’t me, Robby.” “Who was it, pal?”)
    Conte feels himself stand and loom over the man. Feels an enormous belch rising. Leans over the man and lets it all out, all odiferous of salami, onions, mustard, provolone, and red wine. The baby stops crying. The man is startled by the hulk before him, by the stench. The man quickly recovers the balls, which for the moment are still brass, and says, as the provost had said thirty years before, in response to a perfectly reasonable request, “You’re a joke.”
    Conte hears his voice say, “Your son is the next Pavarotti.”
    “It’s a girl. Scram, you ugly fuck.”
    His voice says, softly, “Are you contradicting me?”
    “It’s a girl, asshole. This is a fuckin’ girl.”
    His voice says, “Do you know the movie,
Throw Papa from the Train
?”
    Conte notices welts on the baby’s face, black-and-blue marks on its arms and legs.
    The man says, “Get lost.”
    The man is being lifted out of his seat by the throat. The man is kicking wildly – one kick catches his wife on the side of her head. He’s being choked. Choked screams fading. The Caucasian male is dying. Conte releases him. The man drops down into his seat. Conte hears a voice say, “Encourage your son to nurture his vocal technique. Bobby Rintrona will pay dearly to hear him sing. Do you know Bobby?” The Caucasian male loses control of his sphincter muscle.
    Conte returns to his seat. The baby wails. The woman bleeds from the ear. Conte dozes. In Utica, he follows the man to his car, a late-model BMW. Jots down the license plate number and, standing in the pouring rain, drenched again to the bone, says, “What is your son’s name?”
    As he walks away, Conte finds in his hand a ham sandwich that he’d purchased at the Albany station. Tosses it on a sewer cover, where it’s promptly swarmed by three large rats.

CHAPTER 4
    He boards the bus he still thinks of as the Dago Special – rides it along Bleecker deep into the formerly 95-percent-Italian-American East Side, gets off at Wetmore and walks a block up the rise, in the rain, toward 1318 Mary and the sole bungalow – “the bung hole,” according to Robinson – Conte’s house on a street of well-maintained two- and three-family