11. “She’s
a pieca ass, I’ll tell ya dat. I’m gonna
screw her brains out tonight, right before the festa. Bring it in wid a
bang!” Another voice said in Servi’s
ear, its origins emanating from somewhere in a world cloaked by mist. Yet the voice was familiar, from his recent
past. Pure Brooklynese. For a moment, Servi thought he was back in New York, stuck in
eastbound traffic on the Long Island Expressway, waiting for the next exit, ANY
exit, merely to get off, but it never arrived.
Then he remembered he was lying in a lumpy bed in Rome, sick with an ailment without a surname.
“Whaddya
tawking about?” Servi asked, sitting up
in the bed, the wheels of his mind formulating an arrangement, laying it in
front of him like a newly minted coin ready for circulation.
“Fuckin’
A,” Tony squawked. “I knew you wasn’t
from no fuckin’ Canada. I knows a paison
from my parts when I seez one. Jesus
Christ! You slippery fuck!”
“Let’s
have a drink to celebrate,” Servi said, sitting up in bed.
“Ya
sure? Ya look like shit all warmed up.”
“I’m
OK,” Servi answered, springing out of bed, striding to the bathroom. “Just let me get my shit together, and we’ll
drink a shit loada wine.”
In
the bathroom Servi methodically emptied into an empty pill bottle the fine
white powder of the red pills, which always inclined him into a Rip Van Winkle
stage of slumber. Then with hands
quaking like two leaves still unlucky enough to be on a branch in winter, he
pulled on his clothes.
Dear Aaron, his
mother wrote, I write this with tears,
thinking my youngest son is dead or worse, hurt and unable to contact us…
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