Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [3]
“What you end up becomin’ is up to you,” John said. “I can’t lead you down any road. But whatever it is you do, don’t go into it half-assed. You’ll only wind up hatin’ yourself. Give it everything, the full shot. This way, at the end of the day, when the sun’s down and you know you put in a hundred percent, you’ll feel good about yourself. Maybe even feel proud.”
“You proud of me now?” Giovanni asked.
“You goin’ back to school tomorrow?” his father asked, standing up, dusting off the back of his pants.
“Yeah,” Giovanni said.
“Then I’m proud of you,” Johnny Frontieri said. “And if you end up catchin’ a fish we can all eat, I’ll be even prouder.”
• • •
AS HE GOT older, Giovanni would often dream of a career designing great structures in cities around the world. His would be a life far removed from one confined to tenements and churches, a life in which a hard day’s labor was rewarded only by a solid meal. As a young man, he looked with disdain upon the fabric of his neighborhood—the old women longing for dead men, street hoods living off the gambling habits of the working poor, the church offering solace and peace to the faithful, demanding silent suffering in return. As an adult, he would pine for that lost world, but in his early years in the New York City of 1955, Giovanni Frontieri was intent on hitting the fast lane out of his East Harlem ghetto.
The murder of his father brought those plans to a halt.
• • •
IT RAINED THE day Giovanni’s father died. His legs crossed, John was leaning back in a two-seater in the third car of a near-empty IRT train, on his way to work. It was nearly three in the morning when they passed the Twenty-third Street station. The passengers were either heading to a working man’s job or coming back from an uptown night of drink and dance. Three of the latter, two loud men and one giggling woman, sat in the middle of the car, to the left of John Frontieri. The men were drunk and unsteady, the taller of the two drinking from a pint of Jack Daniel’s, free hand resting on the woman’s knee. The train was stifling, heat hissing from open vents under the seats.
John Frontieri shook his head as he read his Italian newspaper. He was more concerned about Naples losing a title game to Florence than about the hard looks exchanged by the two men across the aisle. He didn’t see one of the men stand and reach for an overhead strap handle. John was reading about an open net goal scored on an inept Naples defense when the man standing pulled a gun and aimed it at the other man, who, five hours earlier, had been his best friend.
In a hard city, a man’s life is often decided by the actions of a simple moment. For Johnny Frontieri that moment arrived in the form of a train engineer who hit the brakes too hard coming into the Fourteenth Street subway stop. The squealing halt turned the man with the gun away from his friend and toward Johnny. The man stared at Frontieri, knowing, even through the haze, that it was too late to stop what had been done.
Frontieri looked up from his paper and knew he was about to die.
He was forty-one years old and had never missed a day’s work in his life. In the spark of an instant, the images of his wife and children meshed into one warm thought.
The doors to the train opened.
The bullet from the cocked gun hit John Frontieri in the forehead. The back of his skull spread across a subway map behind him as his newspaper fell to the floor.
The woman stared up at the standing man and the thin line of smoke from the fired gun in his hand. She then turned to look at the man in the corner of the train, slumped in his seat, blood thick as mud dripping down his chest. She shook her head, tears frozen to her eyes, and screamed.
A scream Johnny Frontieri never heard.
• • •
GIOVANNI WAS DRIVEN downtown with his older brother to identify their father’s body. He looked with impassive eyes as the white sheet was lifted to reveal the dead man whom he loved more than any other. There had been few words between the two, fewer