I’m not quite sure what this piece below will fit into. I need to finish writing the prequel to The Three Lives Of Richie O’Malley. This guy, Vinny (speaking here) is such a great character. I’m adding a link to the free short story that eventually will become that book. You can download it here, along with another free book from a few years ago.

https://books.williamlobb.com/freebies

Tough guys in a tight circle of park benches, under a maple tree outside a courthouse in Newark, NJ. A warm and breezy autumn afternoon. The persistent wind shakes the dead maple and makes it sound like a bag of angry snakes.

Eddie G. pulls a pint of brandy from the paper bag he has stuffed in the pocket of his beige Harrington jacket. Eddie is getting fat; he can’t zip up the front. Our lawyer, for the four of us, is inside beating out a deal and deciding our fate. A couple of guys take long slugs from the bottle, some talk nervously. I sit quietly trying to be alone in this circus of confederates.

Styrofoam cups of coffee and hard rolls with butter arrive in a bag with Sammy T. Sammy hands it to me. I take mine and pass it down the line. He putsdown his coffee and places his hands in his pockets and jumps up and down, rocking on his heels and toes, looking side to side, like his body is charged with nervous electricity.

Three weeks ago, the same group and a different scene; a bar at night. Drinks flowing like from afountain, strippers and VIP rooms. We took over the place and everyone else left. Probably a good move. The party was to celebrate some grapevine news that the case was going to be settled without a trial, maybe thrown out entirely. We could all breathe again. The state had some heavy evidence, but it all somehow went away. The magic of money and high dollar lawyers.

A tight-fitting story, carved carefully around some versions of fact and truth. Like carefully cut jigsaw pieces, every story had at least some elements of the truth and how things actually transpired. A tenuous relationship between what went down and the story we are all desperately selling.

There was a girl and there was sex and a lot of money and a handful of politicians and police, and even more money. Hidden money, lucky money, and dirty money. Alliances formed and failed. Somehow, the sex and money always muddies up the story and breaks the bonds of loyalty. Blood may be thicker than water, but like that song said, ‘Money changes everything…’ Now, the same high dollar lawyer who told us we could relax has called us all here to this chilly park. We expect good news. We plan to hear it’s over. We are no longer under any kind of threat of indictment.

We all know alliances crumble in the face of fear and defending number one. Loyalty fails hard in the company of insincerity and lies. Who actually is fucking who? The guys who always had your back, you find, are now too busy watching their own asses.

Off in the distance, the first thing I see is the suit. Eddie G. notices it too. He walks like a man who wishes he had a big dick, but he ain’t got a big dick. The suit is shiny; it fits perfectly. Before the suit can speak, Eddie yells out, “Look at that fucking thing, it must have cost five hundred dollars!” Sammy jumps in. “No way man, that’s a thousand dollar suit.”

The fancy shiny suit arrives at our little coven in the park. Sammy half-heartedly apologizes for not getting him a coffee, and Eddie offers him a little of the brandy. The suit finally speaks and declines the offers. At five hundred an hour, I hope he makes this quick. He holds up his hands like he’s pushing back a wall that’s closing in. The words are almost surreal and hard to swallow. Like, I hear the words, but my brain can’t place them or what they mean. Words about how he can no longer represent us and is giving us notice of his resignation and the trial and is on and we’ll be informed of the date and the evidence just revealed is damaging and damning.

A flurry or noise like chickens in a coop chasing a handful of tossed corn. Someone calls the lawyer a rat as he turns and walks away. Rat is not a term to use lightly. Life as a rat is living is dangerous. I don’t think the lawyer is a rat, not at all. He’s a coward. The rat is somewhere near me on these benches.

A pall of mistrust falls over the scene. The unspoken and often repeated oaths of loyalty and brotherhood vanish in a flood of fear-fueled suspicion. Faces and conversational tones turn hard.

The shiny thousand-dollar suit said he believes one of us, one of this crew of undying loyalty, has talked to the prosecuting attorney. That was it, really. He said little more. He didn’t need to, truthfully. It was like throwing blood in a pool of sharks. We all got up to leave in silence. A covenant broken. We separate and walk away from each other, like the five points of a star.

I walk away feeling I misplaced my faith and trust. Putting my faith in people exactly like me, that was a stupid place to put it. I’ll go home alone and wait for the news and fall asleep in a chair, cigarette burning in the tray, ice melting and diluting the Clan MacGregor in the sweaty glass. Awakening already in prison, some big ugly thug mouth breathing and sweating down my back. Life inside a Hell of my own making and no exit door I can see. The terror of the moment when everyone I know and care about sees me for exactly who I am and who is known only to me. Eyes open in the darkness, I stare into the mirror of my sins.

All the bravado I can muster leaves me at 3am. I wait now for the news and the knock at the door. My amigos are now my enemies.

There is a comfort in knowing if I stand in this exact place and look to the west, every June 2 at 6:34 am, when the sky is cloudless and clear, the sun will shine precisely on that spot, and that rock.

The trees around me will grow and die and fall, and the rock will probably be there for thousands of years, but that spot on the earth will always catch this June sunrise.

No matter what is in this spot, I imagine the sun will hit it at this exact moment in the year till the end of my time and well beyond, the end of all time, I suppose.

That patch of dirt out on my back lawn is my particular and perculiar and private Stonehenge.

Nothing is significant in this date or day or time,other than it was noticed at this moment, waiting for my coffee to perk.

The comfort is knowing that as long as I can count on the sun hitting that spot next year, and the year after that not everything is broken.

So then, I take comfort in the laws of motion and inertia and gravity and particles of light, and not much else or many other things. My cousin is a scientist and he bought me a book on physics. He’s understands things, the mechanics of the universe. I don’t understand anything, I just need to know some things still work.

I’m feeling a little windswept today, but not enough to billow my sails, or right my ship; the safe harbors are gone. I feel at the mercy of the wind.

He always smelled of Brylcream and I wasn’t even fully sure what that was, but he said it was stuff he put in his hair. I found that quite odd since he didn’t have all that much hair and what he did have on the top was thin, and probably at one time red. From five feet away, you’d think he was bald as a stone. His name was Jake, and some people called him Jake the Snake. I thought that was funny; he didn’t.

Thick black-framed glasses added to the scolding frown he wore on his face and his head shined in the sun and I wondered if the shine was from the Brylcream too. Sometimes he’d wear a hat over his shiny scalp and the dark-framed glasses made him look like someone who was smart. I assumed that to be true and did what he told me.

In the summer, in the morning, we’d sit outside in the back of his house and eat thick and dry oatmeal. Even when it was too hot for oatmeal. He’d finish his breakfast, chawing and sucking on a rhubarb stalk. I tried that stuff once, and that was enough to gag me. The oatmeal was tolerable, but the rhubarb was bitter and awful. Finally, he’d pull a half-burned cigar from behind his ear and light it and inhale deeply and cough and gag sord and long. All I could figure was he was trying to hack up all the cancer I was certain must be growing in his lungs.

We’d work all day, sweating side by side, cutting boards with saws. He’d yell out numbers to me and I desperately try to not cut the boards wrong. When I did, he’d lift his head and motion with his nose and a twist of his head and thick black glasses to go get another one from the pile, while sweat dropped off his nose and flew off to the side of his face. Then he’d tell me that board was coming out of my pay, and I’d laugh because I worked for nothing and even though he looked mean, Jake was kind most days.

My summers as a carpenter were the result of some deal concocted between the old man and my ma to teach me something—anything—and try to keep me out of trouble. School had miserably failed me by my twelfth summer, and I guess Ma figured something had to take with me. As a student, I wasn’t much for learning anything I deemed not worth my time to learn. Most of what they tried to teach me in school I saw was not worth my time. Algebra made a little sense to me, but not much else did. One teacher told Ma he thought I may have problems with my brain. I was incapable of learning even basic things.

I liked the sweet and sour smell of the cut wood, but the sawdust made me itch. I liked the scream of the saw as it cut its way through the lumber. It scared me, but I guess I liked being scared. When the saw was cutting, I couldn’t hear anything else, and the noise would ring in my head long after the blade stopped singing.

I lived in fear I’d cut my fingers off every day of that hot summer. By the time we stopped for lunch to eat a bologna sandwich—every day, every single goddamn day, it was a bologna sandwich—I’d wished it was time to go home, but just because I was lazy, not because there was anything all that great about being home. One day, I was looking at his hand as he ate his bologna sandwich. I asked him how he lost the middle two fingers on his left and he pointed to the saw with his nose and his thick black-framed glasses and didn’t say anything else about it.

I’d work the saw and sometimes after I had cut enough, he’d let me hammer in some nails. Hammering seemed more work than cutting. He’d watch me banging, and I’d get nervous and bend some. He didn’t say much, but he had a way of showing silent disapproval.

Every afternoon, the sun would go down and behind a wide hedgerow of weeds and staghorn sumac trees. At least that’s what kind of trees he told me they were that separated the house we were building from another vacant lot. Finally, he’d raise his head and tell me to go to the truck. I knew this meant the work was over. I’d run to the truck and grab the cooler, once filled with ice but now just full of water and cans and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Then I’d run back and meet him and we’d sit on a pile of boards and drink the cool, not cold, Schlitz beer and shots of the bitter brown whiskey.

He’d look at what we’d built and what didn’t go so right that day and say it was a good day’s work. The way he said it made me feel that a good day’s work was something to be proud of and feel good about. Then he’d tilt back his head and pour an entire can down his throat and burp and open another can and take a long pull off the bottle. Then he’d toss me a Schlitz and pass me the bottle and tell me I’d earned it, but don’t tell nobody he let me drink.

Jake always said the beer tasted better after a good day’s work. I didn’t understand at the time what he meant, but I liked the secret beers, and the whiskey made me feel better. I liked building things and not fucking up too much.

Then one day, after a few beers and slugs of the bitter brown whiskey, I asked him how come he don’t have any family and he lived all alone. He pointed with his nose and thick black glasses at the bottle. He said that bottle was his family. I got out of his truck that night a little drunk and a little tired and I wondered all the way home if the whiskey would one day be my family too.

I used to look on the world with the wonder of an eight-year-old boy in a junkyard. Life was filled with confounding pieces and parts found scattered amongst the weeds and wildflowers.

Scavenging and hoarding, I’d bring home my prizes and hide them. Later, with my stash, I’d take it all apart with wrenches and screwdrivers and maybe bloody a knuckle or two. Like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab, old tube radios and TVs and carburetors, dissecting and disassembling, my hope was to one day understand them and make the dead junk work again.

The end plan was to build a spaceship and get out of here. The saddest day was the day I looked at the old junk and realized it was that and nothing more, and I was here and who I was, and nothing more. I’d never be a spaceman, and old junk is exactly that.

All I could afford was what I could steal, and I stole all I needed. The day the grandiose plan went to the weeds, was the day boyhood escaped. I’ve spent the last decades desperately trying to find it again. I don’t need to believe I can fly away to Mars, but simply one more time to find the treasure down in the dead flowers and oil stains and rust.

I stood in the same spot where the big yellow and rusted bulldozers had come to rape the dirt and cut deep gouges and ruts in the soil, and I wondered why the earth didn’t bleed from such gashes.

The air was cold and tiny ice crystals burned and froze the inside of my nose. In silence I watched the dirty and abused world turn two-tone. The sky was gray and the trees were gray and the fields were gray. The house in the distance was white and the snow that fell from the sky was white and slowly and methodically the fields and my boots and coat turned white until me and all I could see and feel was a singular cold entity. A boy in pants wet up to his knee and frozen and a coat and the gray trees and sky and the world turned white.

The falling snow muffled the sound from the barn, the cows inside were as warm as a cow in a barn can be. And the snow covered the cow shit and for the first time I noticed that in this spot the world was silent, like death and I couldn’t smell the sweet grassy shit.

I stood there for a long time frozen and still. I stared at the white house through what had become an enveloping and consuming storm to a window that looked out toward the road. In a tiny corner of the front room of the house I saw someone had turned on the tree we’d brought inside last week and decorated with shiny things and the lights of blue and green and red made the window look like fire.

Smoke rose from the chimney and my frozen nose smelled the burning wood and I stood there motionless hoping I’d never move again and I’d never leave this place. But, for reasons not my own or my doing I left for a long string of days and now the bulldozers have come and the place I lived is dead.