Shoot the Moonlight Out Read online

  When his folks died, the world really started feeling like a cruel joke to Jack. That decade of good days had merely been a preamble to this decade of death and destruction. He and Amelia struggled on. They clung to each other even harder. The house was empty and sad. It took Jack months to deal with everything he needed to deal with. His father had put Jack’s name on the deed to the house, thank Christ, but he needed to update it to include Amelia. He knew he needed a will and a health-care proxy. He had everything his parents had left behind to go through—bank accounts, safe-deposit boxes, insurance policies, crates of stuff. He had to transfer all the bills to his name.

  The house is run-down these days. Needs a new roof. The railing on the porch is rotting. The front steps need to be redone. Rogue squirrels have busted two windows in the attic. The oil tank in the basement is fifty years old, and Jack’s always worried it’s going to blow up. The linoleum in the kitchen is cracked and peeling from the edges. The bathroom sink makes loud clanging noises. The upstairs and downstairs showers have good water pressure, but the grout is full of mold and the drains are clogged. There’s a spot on the floor in the upstairs bathroom where water is somehow leaking through and bubbling the ceiling in the dining room below. The ceiling in the bedroom’s in rough shape too.

  Amelia’s eighteen now. She just graduated from Fontbonne. It hadn’t been cheap. She’s going to Fordham in the fall. She wants to be a writer. She took a creative writing class her senior year and loved it. She’s been getting guidebooks, trying her hand at stories and even starting work on a novel. High school is tough under any circumstances—figuring out who she is, who she might want to be—but add tragedy to the mix and it was a million times more brutal. Amelia has had enough tragedy to last her a lifetime. Jack hopes more than anything that she can have a peaceful and happy existence from here on out. He’ll do everything he can to keep trouble from her door, and he hopes she’s smart enough to steer clear of trouble. She is. She’s a bright kid. Good head on her shoulders. He’s only forty, but he hopes he lives to see her marry someone nice and have a kid or couple of kids, write that novel, do all the things she dreams of doing. She keeps a map of the world on her wall, and she sticks pins into the places she wants to visit. Italy, Jamaica, Brazil, Hollywood. So many places she wants to see. He doesn’t want to tell her she can’t do it all, might not even do any of it. What’s the point? Let her dream.

  Jack hasn’t been with anyone since Janey, hasn’t dragged any girlfriends or stepmoms into the picture, but he does have a secret life. Something he can’t tell his daughter about. Won’t ever tell her about. It’s given him some purpose—other than just being a dad—these past few years.

  It started one day at the Wrong Number, the dive where he sometimes hangs out. He was drinking heavily right after Janey died. Starting early on his days off while Amelia was at school. His buddy Frankie Modica, who he’d gone to St. Mary’s and Our Lady of the Narrows with, asked him to hurt the priest who’d molested his son. His son was ten. The priest was at Most Precious Blood. To no one’s surprise, the diocese was protecting him. Word was that soon they’d move him to a parish in Western New York, Buffalo maybe, where no one knew of his crimes. His name was Father Pat. Frankie said he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, he didn’t have the chops, but he knew Jack was tough. He could give him some money, not much in the end, maybe a grand.

  “What are you asking me?” Jack said.

  “To hurt him,” Frankie said. “You don’t have to kill him. Just hurt him. I want to see the guy pay. Right now all he’s being is protected.”

  Jack thought about it. He wasn’t violent by nature but he was definitely capable of violence when necessary. He’d been in bar fights where honor was on the line. He thought about a bad guy like this Father Pat getting away with what he’d done. He was sick to his stomach over the fact that someone like that kept right on living in the world when Janey didn’t get that chance, when she got ripped away. He’d learned that much was true in life. Bad people often lived easier and better than good people. They endured, while good people dropped like flies. He figured what the hell. He could pour his anger and sadness into it. He got the address where the priest was hiding.

  Since time was a concern—they weren’t sure when Father Pat was being moved—he went there the next night with a baseball bat, wearing a ski mask, and beat the bad priest within an inch of his life. He was surprised how easy it was. He went to this cold place in his head where it didn’t even feel like he was doing what he was doing. He’d seen movies about detached hitmen and that’s what he felt like. All business. In and out. He split when it was over, left Father Pat bleeding and moaning on the floor. The bastard hadn’t even protested. He probably figured he had it coming to him.

  Frankie said he was a saint. Jack wanted to refuse the money—he wanted to say he’d done it on principle—but he figured he could put it away for Amelia’s future. Start the college fund he’d always meant to start. Make sure he’d set her up in case something happened to him too. He put the cash in a safe-deposit box at his bank.

  What he hadn’t expected was that word would spread. People started coming to him with their problems, telling him about somebody who’d wronged them, stolen from them, hurt somebody close to them. There’d been fifteen jobs. The fifth one was when he started bringing a gun he bought out of Slim Helen’s trunk on Avenue X. He keeps it wrapped in a cloth in the basement, tucked in a nook in the open ceiling over the oil burner, the bullets in a nearby cookie tin. On his seventh job he used the gun, killed a guy who’d raped a girl from the parish. He’d proceeded with the same cold detachment. It was a few months after his parents died, and he found it to be cathartic. The rapist didn’t even look afraid. He seemed thankful. Jack was taking poison out of the world. Now he has enough in the bank to help Amelia make a good life for herself. Somewhere down the road, he figures he’ll stop. What if Amelia gets married and has a kid and he has to hold that kid, be a grandpa, and know in his heart that he’s hurting and killing people on the side? Sure, they’re bad people, but that’s still a lot of blood on his hands. Plus, he’s getting worried that Amelia’s going to find out. There’s a network of secrets that’s been built and maintained, but it only goes so far. All it takes is one violation of trust, one person saying something to a cousin who can’t shut up. He hopes Amelia doesn’t find out, but he’ll deal with it if she does. He’ll lay out his case. He’ll explain that he did it because he wants a better world for her.

  Amelia comes onto the porch with a can of Diet Coke. She lives on Diet Coke. She hardly eats anymore. Melba toast, half a grapefruit, maybe a scrambled egg a couple of times a week. The girl who loved pasta fagioli and spedini and semolina bread and sfinge is gone. She eats like a bird, sucks down her canned diet sodas. She has a streak of pink in her brown hair. That’s something they wouldn’t let her do at Fontbonne. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and jean shorts and her red Chucks. Eighteen. He’s wondering, as he always does when he looks at her now, how it got here so fast, her being an adult. He blinks and she’s a baby in his arms. That big heavenly smile. Those brown eyes that came right from her mother.

  “What’s up, kid?” Jack says. He likes their banter. He likes that she likes to banter with him. A lot of kids, they don’t give their folks the time of day, but Amelia’s always got time to shoot the shit.

  She sits on the rickety chair across from him, setting her can on her leg, trying to balance it. He can see the ring of condensation it leaves on the denim.

  “Not much,” she says.

  “Lazy summer day,” he says.

  “Yeppers.”

  “You working on your schedule for the fall?”

  “I’ll get to it.”

  “When’s that orientation?”

  “A couple of weeks, I think. I’ve gotta find the letter they sent.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice, okay? As your old man and as somebody who speaks from personal experience.”

  “
Here we go.”

  “I’m serious. Be organized. That’s it. That’s my advice. Be organized. Start a folder. Have a drawer where you keep important stuff. Use that file box of Nonno’s I gave you. Trust me. I learned the hard way how important it is.”

  “Groundbreaking advice, Pop.”

  “Okay, be a smartass. I’m trying to teach you what I’ve learned so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.” He nudges her foot with his foot. “You were up late again last night, huh?” He’d heard her pecking at the keys of his mother’s old Royal typewriter. Digging that up in the basement had been one of the best days. The glow in her eyes. His mother had taken care of it. Kept it under a cover. Had a hefty backup stash of ribbons. Had brought it to the typewriter shop on Stillwell Avenue for maintenance. She’d always liked writing letters on it, his mother. It was massive, heavy as hell. When they got it set up on the desk in Amelia’s room, she’d hugged him hard and then she’d run straight to Genovese for typewriter paper.

  “The work’s never done,” she says.

  “How’s the novel coming? You gonna let me read it?”

  “Maybe when it’s finished.”

  “And you’re still not gonna tell me what it’s about?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know Ron Redden from the Wrong Number? He used to write. He says to me a couple of weeks ago he’s got a million stories from the bar. All these drunks across the decades. Guys puking on the bar, pissing on the floor. This one guy—they called him Phil the Mustache—shitting on the pinball machine. I guess he thought it was the toilet. Then, he says, there’s love affairs gone wrong. Fights. The time Sancho Stern stabbed Gene Carcaramo. The hit that happened there. The Brancaccios whacking Robbie Guttadoro. He says someday he’s gonna put all these stories in a book. I says, ‘Ron, who wants that?’ You want bar stories, you go to the bar. I wanna read about a guy shitting on a pinball machine? Give me James Clavell, Larry McMurtry, Stephen King. I need a story. Not scraps.”

  Amelia finishes her Diet Coke, rattling the can over her open mouth for the last few drops and then holding it up, sunlight glinting off the silver. “What would you do if I just crushed this can on my head right now?” she asks.

  “I mean, I guess I’d be impressed,” he says.

  They laugh together. There’s nothing he likes more than hearing their laughter in harmony like this.

  “So, what’ve you got planned today?” Jack asks.

  “Picking up Miranda. She’s got a doctor’s appointment in Bay Ridge, and then we’re gonna get coffee or something.” Amelia got her own car about six months ago. It cost two grand—he’d gotten them a good deal from the guys at Flash Auto. Amelia had paid about half with money she’d saved up from her part-time gig as a file clerk at a dermatologist’s office in Dyker Heights. He covered the rest.

  “You’re a good friend.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Just sitting around, taking it easy. Maybe I’ll go to the Wrong Number for a drink later.” But that’s not true. He has one of his side jobs lined up.

  Amelia gets up, struts over, and gives him a kiss on the head. She takes her car keys out of her pocket. On her key chain, there’s a thing of pepper spray he bought for her and a crimson Golden Nugget key chain from Nonno. “See you later, Pop.”

  “Love you,” he says.

  “You too.” She takes her empty can and bounces down the front steps, dropping it in the garbage as she heads out the front gate to her car, parked up the block in front of Teddy and Sandra Dasaro’s house.

  The job he has is one he’s on the fence about.

  Mary Mucci, who Jack knows from West Fourth Street, got wind of the types of services he’s been providing and asked him to do something about Max Berry in Bay Ridge. Max has been running what’s turned out to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, where “investors” deposit money in return for high interest rates. Max is holding Mary’s money hostage, and she’s essentially been bankrupted by the venture. Money she intended to pass down to her kids and grandkids. Same thing’s happening to a lot of other working-class folks across Southern Brooklyn. Max is preying on vulnerable people. In one way, he deserves what’s coming to him—stealing from those who have very little to steal. In another way, Jack isn’t sure he should go through with this. Max hasn’t killed or raped anyone or molested a kid. He deserves jail time but not necessarily vigilante justice. Mary didn’t specify what she wants him to do to Max, but Jack’s thinking just a warning shot across the bow will do. Let him know this is real. Let him know he’s ruining real lives. Show him the gun. Maybe jab him in the guts. A dead Max won’t help Mary. He’s a degenerate but maybe he just needs to be compelled to reconsider what he’s been doing.

  Jack goes inside and boils some water in a pot on the stove for coffee. He’s got this way of making coffee that grosses Amelia out. He boils the water, adds a couple of tablespoons of grounds, some crushed eggshells that he keeps in a Ziploc bag in the fridge, and a pinch of salt. He stirs it all together and then strains it into his mug. It’s how his grandmother taught him to make coffee. She was a good lady. Tall for a grandmother. Strong hands. She died when he was seventeen, before Janey, before his life really got going. He thinks of her every time he makes coffee. He’s never really decided how he feels about death, what he thinks the dead are doing with their time. He’s always found it strange that people seem to predominantly believe that the dead are spending their time watching over the living. That notion always brings the image of a dead loved one perched in front of a bank of security TVs, watching live-feed footage of happenings on earth. Sure, check in now and again, he gets that, but he hopes being dead isn’t all about lusting after living. He isn’t comforted by thinking of Janey just constantly having to watch over him and Amelia. He’d rather think of her relaxing, no agony whatsoever, no worries, just peace as far as the eye can see, as loud as the ear can hear. He likes to think that she’s just totally overwhelmed by the feeling of love and happiness that she felt at their best moments: their wedding at the Riviera; Amelia’s birth at Victory Memorial; Amelia’s first steps in this very kitchen. He likes to think that she’s powered by that feeling in the afterlife.

  It’s dead quiet in the house. He shuts off the gas and lets his muddy mixture slow from a boil. Once it’s cooled, he goes through the elaborate straining process over the sink. He tosses the shell-spotted grounds into the garbage and rinses the strainer.

  He sits with his coffee at the table and watches the clock.

  When he’s done, he rinses his cup and puts it upside down on a folded dish towel on the counter next to the sink. He grabs his car keys from a hook by the kitchen door and goes down to the basement for his gun. It’s a .38; that’s what Slim Helen told him anyhow. He doesn’t know anything about guns, doesn’t have any room in his brain for that kind of information. It works when he needs to use it. He stuffs it in his waistline and heads out of the house, locking up.

  His car is out on the street too. The house has a shared driveway but the neighbors have taken to blocking it, and he thinks it’s a fight not worth fighting. Sometimes it’s hell to find a spot, but it’s easier than creating tension with the Yugoslavian family that moved in next door a few years back. He takes the gun out of his waistline and puts it in the glove compartment with his maps and retired air fresheners and receipts from Flash Auto.

  Max Berry’s office is in Bay Ridge. To get there, Jack takes Bath Avenue to Bay Parkway, makes a left, and then hops on the Belt Parkway right before Shore Parkway and Ceasar’s Bay. It always bugs him that Ceasar is spelled that way, but it’s not named for Julius Caesar, it’s named for the fucking guy who started the bazaar in 1982, Ceasar Salama. Back then, it was a big flea market, but it’s pretty much just become a strip mall.

  The Belt thrums with traffic. Jack turns on WINS for news and weather. He changes it when a piece of bad news sets his mind in the wrong direction and puts on WCBS-FM for oldies instead. He grew up loving Jimi Hendrix and th
e Doors, stuff like that, but he has a soft spot for some of the oldies, especially Dion and the Belmonts, Elvis Presley, and all the girl groups. The Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, they were something.

  Things are stop-and-go all the way to the Verrazano. They open up after that, but he’s only on the parkway for another few seconds before getting off at the exit for Fourth Avenue. His history with Bay Ridge is long, and coming here—though it’s only a couple of neighborhoods over—always feels so far away. He went to high school at Our Lady of the Narrows on Shore Road. Amelia just graduated from Fontbonne Hall Academy, also on Shore Road. His father used to bring him to Hinsch’s for egg creams. He had a job for a summer cleaning out a carpet warehouse on Colonial Road. He was born at Victory Memorial Hospital and so were Janey and Amelia. His first drink was at O’Sullivan’s on Third Avenue. When he was in his late teens, he’d take long walks here from Gravesend, look into storefronts, dreaming up different lives for himself.