Exact Revenge Page 13

  “I wasn’t trying to pass anything off on you,” I say for the tenth time, “and I’m not a white man. My mother was a Mohawk.”

  “We’re Akwesasne,” the little one, Bonaparte, says, zipping up his fly.

  “Her family was from the reservation outside Toronto,” I say, remembering now that the northern Mohawks call themselves by their own name.

  Bonaparte narrows his eyes and says, “You got a white nose.”

  “My father,” I say. “My mother grew up in the Onondaga Nation.”

  “So after George here beats your ass black and blue,” he says, “you can go back down there and rediscover your roots, but no one comes up here and passes bad money to us. Not no white man. Not no half-breed. Not no skin.

  “Go ahead, George.”

  The biggest Indian steps for me and swings a big fist from out far. I duck and rabbit-punch him just below the rib cage. The air huffs out of George and he staggers, then kicks at me hard with a gilt-toed cowboy boot. He’s quick for a big man, and the metal toe nicks my knee and I tumble. George is on top of me with his fists pummeling. I slip out, twist his arm up and back, and jam his face into the gravel. He roars.

  I whip my legs around his abdomen and clamp my arms around his neck. I twist and squeeze at the same time, and after less than ten seconds of struggling, George collapses on his face.

  I’m on my feet. Ready.

  Bonaparte waves his gun in my direction and says, “Take your goddamn bike and get the fuck off this reservation.”

  It’s a ten-mile walk to Massena, but I’m not sitting in this guy’s piss.

  “You can keep the bike,” I say, turning to go. “It’s stolen.”

  “Hey,” Bonaparte says. “You really a skin?”

  “Call down to the Nation,” I say, stopping to look him in the eyes. “My mother was Martha St. Claire. They named me Running Deer.”

  One side of Bonaparte’s mouth creeps up as if he’s either skeptical or amused.

  “You want a job, Quick Buck?”

  “Doing what?”

  “What you just did,” he says, angling his face down at George, who is now sitting up and rubbing the back of his neck.

  “I need a place to stay,” I say, “and I need to stay away from the white law.”

  “The only law here is me,” Bonaparte says. “We’re a sovereign nation.”

  He sticks the pistol back in his jeans, turns, and climbs back into the extended cab. I get in on the other side. George gets into the front seat with the other long-haired goon, whose name is Bert. Bert’s big belly is shaking and he’s having a hard time not smiling, even under George’s evil glare.

  A grainy picture of Lester and one of me from twenty years ago runs the next day on page five of the Watertown Daily Times. It talks about the attempted escape, how Lester Cole was shot dead, and that they are looking for my body somewhere downstream. Mostly, it’s treated as downstate news, separate and apart from the North Country. Anyway, Bonaparte and his men don’t seem to read much and my hair is much longer now than in the picture. Even so, I take to wearing a Buffalo Bills cap with the brim pulled low.

  The Akwesasne let me share a trailer with Bert, the big man with fat round cheeks and eyes squinted in a permanent smile. He has an old streamliner, a silver-skinned melon buried in a nest of high grass and weeds. It’s small but clean, with two tiny bedrooms and its own shower and toilet that drains into a septic tank that has to be pumped once a month. Bert leaves me alone for the most part, except when he’s trying to get me to participate in one of his two favorite pastimes: drinking Molson Golden and thumb wrestling.

  One day I am reading a New York Times account about Judge Villay’s ruling for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on same-sex marriages when Bert walks in with a bottle of Molson Golden. He offers me one and I look up from my paper to say that I would. When Bert sees the paper, his face clouds over and he takes a step toward me.

  “You know that man?”

  There is a picture of the curly-headed little judge, Dean Villay, in the top corner of the page.

  “Long time ago,” I say.

  “Friend?”

  “Enemy.”

  “Good,” Bert says, his face softening a bit, but his voice still bitter. He goes to the refrigerator and returns with a bottle of beer for me.

  “If I ever get the chance,” he says, flopping down in a worn-down La-Z-Boy recliner, “I’m gonna kill that man, judge or no judge.”

  Bert tells me the story about his younger brother who lived and worked in Watertown and a trip the two of them took one weekend to visit some friends at the Onondaga Nation so they could watch the ABA bowling championships in Syracuse. They were at a South Side bar after the finals when his brother got into a scuffle with some locals. After the fight, the two of them decided to head north instead of spending the night with their friends on the reservation. They were back at his brother’s apartment in Watertown when his brother realized that somehow during the fight he had lost his knife, a nickel-plated switchblade.

  The next day, the police showed up at the door to arrest his brother for the murder of the man he got into the fight with. Villay was prosecuting his brother on the theory that after the fight, he ambushed the dead man while he walked home, stabbing him fifteen times with the nickel-plated switchblade that was left at the scene.

  Bert was his brother’s only alibi and chance to prove his innocence. At the trial, Villay had torn Bert to pieces, but the jury never did get to issue a verdict. The night after Bert’s testimony, his brother hanged himself in the Public Safety Building.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance,” Bert says, getting up for two more bottles of beer, “but if I do…”

  Bonaparte isn’t the chief, but he runs things: the casino, the big-stakes bingo parlors, and a smuggling operation that brings mostly cigarettes across the river from Canada, where the taxes are low enough to make the whole venture extremely profitable. Bonaparte also runs some marijuana to supply the Adirondacks, but it’s not a big market and I think he and his men smoke most of the profits.

  I get paid every Friday in cash. We drive up to Bonaparte’s big white contemporary home overlooking the river, and he laughs as he pays me with hundred-dollar bills that he says might be real, but might not, since I don’t know the difference. Most of the men eat, drink, smoke, and gamble away their pay, but they don’t seem to resent me for saving my money and spending most of my free time reading under the bare bulb that hangs down over Bert’s couch. My name has evolved from Running Deer to Bonaparte’s Quick Buck to the men’s version of Quick Book.

  There is an Akwesasne named Andre who is one of Bonaparte’s lieutenants, and after a while Bert and I are the ones who get sent with him to collect drug money. I’m not crazy about these runs since they take us off the reservation, but this isn’t a democracy and I don’t get a vote.

  Andre is a young man, only twenty-five. He is smooth-skinned and handsome, with big round eyes, a straight narrow nose, and shiny black hair cut blunt just above his collar. He’s a half-breed like me, and with dark hair on his arms and legs, he looks more like a Caucasian than an Indian, but no one ever talks about it. Andre plays the guitar and his passion is his band, but it’s his viciousness that pays the bills. He’s the one Bonaparte sends out to collect from the white man.

  The rumor is that Andre beat up his own father with a tire iron. It is fact that he’s done it to plenty of other white men, and it doesn’t take me long to realize that Andre likes his job, that he goes into a place eager for trouble.

  One night, we catch up with a pot dealer in his cabin outside of Lake Placid. The guy has this high school cheerleader on his couch stripped down and ready to go when we bust in. He coughs up the cash he owes real fast, but Andre bops him on the head with the butt of his gun anyway and grabs the girl by the wrist and starts dragging her screaming into the bedroom.

  I put my hand on Andre’s shoulder.

  “Come on,” I s
ay, and before I can blink, his Colt.45 is cocked and in my face.

  “You don’t touch me, you fucking bookworm,” he says. “Not ever.”

  “Then come on,” I say, not letting go.

  The girl wrestles free and scampers into the bedroom, where she slams the door shut. Andre gives me a twisted smile.

  “You just get your ass outside and wait for me to finish up in here,” he says, “or Bert’s gonna be cleaning your brains up off that wall with a paper towel.”

  My eyes don’t waver and I say, “Go ahead. You’ll be saving me and a lot of other people a whole hell of a lot of trouble. We got what we came for.”

  “Bang!” Andre yells, jerking the gun.

  I just stare, and he begins to laugh and pats me on the back. To Bert he says, “You got a real loon here, you know that? I hope you lock loon-man in his room at night.”

  We leave together with the money and Andre’s arm around my shoulder. After that, Bonaparte starts sending Bert and me out alone. Andre seems to behave himself whenever we’re together, but I still don’t trust him and I can’t help the feeling that one day, when my guard is down, he’s going to do me some harm.

  29

  THE SUN HAD ALREADY GONE DOWN. Outside, the muffled sound of taxi horns and truck brakes moved along Park Avenue. Lexis stood in the darkness. Only the vaguest shapes of the painting in front of her could be discerned now. When she first went into her trance there was enough light to see. She heard her name being shouted from somewhere deep inside their apartment. She set her brush down on the palette and placed both on the small table where she kept her paints.

  She finished off the half-empty glass of chardonnay before shedding her smock and brushing off the front of her sweater. In the front hall, Frank was waiting, holding open her three-quarter-length mink coat.

  “Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”

  “Will you hurry up?” he said, shaking the coat.

  He smelled strongly of Cool Water cologne, and the milky soft black leather of his coat matched the color of his belt and shoes. His silk shirt and wool slacks were also black. On his wrist was a big gold Rolex studded with diamonds. On his pinky was a three-karat gold diamond ring.

  “Where’s your wedding band?” Frank said with a scowl, lifting her hand as she pushed it through the fur sleeve.

  “Here,” she said, spreading her fingers so he could see the thin platinum band.

  “Go get your good one,” he said, pointing his finger. The heavy slabs of his cheeks were turning red. She could see the top of his head as he looked down at her feet, and a small bald spot beneath that curly black-and-white hair.

  “Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”

  “It’s our championship game and people will be there, goddamn it,” he said, still looking down, his lips pressed tight after the words were out. “I don’t buy you that stuff to sit in a drawer.”

  Lexis turned and hurried down the long hallway. She walked through the broad double doors and into her closet. At the far end was her jewelry drawer. She found the ring quickly, and without bothering to lock the drawer, she hurried out of the bedroom and back down the hall, stopping in the kitchen for a quick glass of wine.

  “Got it,” she said, splaying her fingers for Frank as she walked into the rotunda entryway of their apartment.

  Frank only huffed and opened the door for her. The white-gloved elevator man was waiting. Outside, their long black limo was idling at the curb. Frank wedged his massive frame into the backseat and the doorman handed Lexis in after him. The glass partition was up. That’s the way Frank liked it, and he picked up the phone to tell Duvall to hurry up because Lexis had made them late.

  “Again,” he said, frowning at her.

  “Pour me one of those, would you, Frank?” she said. “You’d think you were playing tonight.”

  Frank poured two fingers of bourbon from the crystal decanter and handed her the Baccarat glass.

  “It is like I am playing,” he said, pouring himself a glass. “If he didn’t remind me so goddamn much of myself, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. But shit, every scout from Syracuse to Alabama is going to be there.”

  “He seemed calm enough,” Lexis said, feeling the warmth of the liquor spread through her. The car turned onto the West Side Highway. Ships moving up the river appeared in the dark. Lights from New Jersey twinkled on the other side. Ahead, the George Washington Bridge spanned the night, illuminated by hundreds of blue-white lights and pulsing with the flow of red taillights.

  “He hides it,” he said. “Like I do. He’s nervous, though. I can see it. It’s a guy thing.”

  Frank picked up the phone. “Pass that guy, goddamn it, Duvall. I told you to hurry.”

  The limo surged ahead, swerving in and out of the traffic. Someone blared his horn. Lexis held out her empty glass. Frank pulled down the corners of his mouth.

  “Afraid I’ll embarrass you?” Lexis said, shaking the glass.

  Frank puckered his lips and poured another. “Embarrass” was a hot button. A word she would fire at him from time to time that reminded them both of the day she caught him cheating dead to rights. The day he promised to kill her if she ever tried to leave him and take his son.

  Frank loved to pretend to the world that all was well in the Steffano household. He hated to be reminded that it was all a façade. She couldn’t always push that button, but on a night like tonight, this close to game time and all the people, she knew she had the upper hand.

  She smiled to herself and backed into the corner of the car, sipping from her drink with both hands. Frank took out his cell phone and called one of his friends, confirming a business meeting for later.

  Theirs wasn’t the only limo pulling up to the big game at Riverdale Country, but it was the only one Lexis saw with chrome tire rims that matched the grille. The air was crisp and a breeze wafted up from the Hudson River and across Bertino Field. The bleachers were already filled and buzzing under the lights. They walked across the grass and along the track. The team was warming up. Frank walked through a small opening in the fence and right up to the edge of the playing field where the referees were conferring.

  “Allen Francis,” he yelled, cupping his hands. “Go kick their goddamn ass, son!”

  Allen looked at his father, then dipped his face mask down to his knee, intent on his stretching. Frank strode back toward the track pumping his clenched fist, his face a beaming smile.

  A man in a brown suede coat with his arm around his wife walked past looking. Under his breath, he said, “What an asshole.”

  “That Allen’s such a good kid,” the wife said, shaking her head.

  “Nothing like the old man,” said the husband.

  Lexis jammed her hands into her coat pockets and turned her head.

  Frank returned with a flushed face and said, “He’s ready now.”

  He led Lexis up to the top row and told some older people to squeeze down for the quarterback’s parents.

  “Frank,” Lexis said.

  Too loud, he said, “What? These snooty old farts wouldn’t even be in the championship if it weren’t for my boy. They can slide their skinny asses right down.”

  Lexis clamped her lips tight and angled her face away. Frank began to scour the crowd for college scouts with his binoculars. Lexis was thinking that at the quarter break she could get a quick one back at the car.

  “There,” Frank said, still loud, grabbing her arm and pointing. “That’s the guy from Syracuse. There’s the one from Penn State over there.”

  Lexis glanced and nodded, then quickly focused on Allen as the team broke into small groups after their stretching. Allen began throwing passes down the field to his receivers, licking his fingers between throws.

  “Look at that arm,” Frank said.

  “You didn’t play quarterback, did you, Frank?” Lexis asked, feeling light-headed.

  Frank glanced at her quickly, then put his binoculars back up to his face. />
  “I had a hell of an arm,” he said. “Just like him. But, you know, with my size they put me on the line. That’s the only thing he got from you. Those eyes and that frame.”

  Lexis just nodded.

  30

  THE THIRD COLLECTION RUN for Bert and me on our own takes us to an old refurbished hotel on Raquette Lake by the name of Bright Side. I study a map before we leave and see that Lake Kora is close by and right on the way. I’m driving Bert’s old Ford Bronco, and he’s asleep with his face against the window when I pull off Route 28 and down Uncas Road. When I stop the truck, Bert scratches his head and rubs his eyes. It’s late afternoon and the sun is shining through a warm breeze, but I slip a flashlight from under the seat into the side pocket of my cargo pants.

  “A little lost,” I say.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “I gotta piss anyway.”

  Bert climbs out and makes for the bushes. I walk down a dirt path that leads to the water, the smell of pine needles in my nose. Across the lake, under the shadows of some tall hemlock trees, I think I see the rooflines of the cottage that Lester told me about. Up the shore a ways is a weathered dock and a small skiff. I pick my way along the rocks on the water’s edge and check out the new camp that was apparently built over the spot where Durant’s lodge used to be. It’s a Tuesday and late in the season, so I’m not surprised there are no signs of any people.

  I’m halfway across the small lake, rowing, when Bert appears on the shore.

  “What the fuck you doing?” he asks with his hands cupped around his mouth.

  “I think I know where we are,” I say. “I had a friend used to own that place over there. I’m just checking it out.”