Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

right, is Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro, the don’s closest confidant and capo. “Salud, boss, Salud,” he says with a gracious nod, sipping the vintage wine. “Here’s to getting this thing done.”

Next to Dalessandro sits a jittery young man in a flannel shirt and spiky hair named Mark Ferri (better known on the street as Marky-Mark). Slumped in his chair, picking at his nose more than his food, Mark is the old man’s youngest grandson and biggest embarrassment. The boy is here tonight to somehow redeem himself in the eyes of his elder. Secretly, though, the underlings in the Ferri crew are giving heavy odds in favor of the kid screwing this Indian thing up big time.

After the toast, the Morelli brothers—who run an assassination bureau known chiefly among Outfit insiders as “The Body Shop”—share a loaded glance. “I gotta tell ya, Mr. Ferri,” the older one, Jack, finally says. A ruddy-complected bull of a man, he looks skeptical. “I’m still a little fuzzy on why all the heavy machinery for this one guy. Who is he—the Amazing Fucking Hulk?”

Freddy Felson covers his grin, and a couple of the others stifle chuckles.

“Excellent question,” the old man says after taking a luxurious gulp of Rossi di Montalcino and swishing it around his mouth like a regular sommelier. “He isn’t that amazing... but he sure is a fucking hulk. I want a level of certainty on this one, Jackie, basically. And we need to expedite this particular thing, fellas. The nigger tells me it’s gotta be tomorrow, next day at the latest.”

“Why all the muscle though?” Freddy Felson speaks up, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing curiously. “Way I understand it, the guy’s half gone anyway, brain fucked up. Soused all the time. Be like picking off a duck in a barrel.”

The old man dabs his pristine little silver mustache with a cloth napkin. “I want to do this as quickly and cleanly and neatly as possible, Freddy—the shenanigans he’s been pulling—I don’t want any doubt. I don’t want to send any messages here. I just want to insure this individual is removed from the planet earth.”

The other Morelli brother, a huge man with very little neck, name of Jilly, grins at the others. “Don’t mess with Mother Nature,” he quips.

Big laughs on this one. Laughs all around the table. The ice is broken, and everybody gets it now: the agenda is set. The goal is clear, and there is consensus among all parties. And thus the men commence with dinner and fellowship, greeting the next course as it comes through the swinging doors with a chorus of lusty whoops and hollers.

Oswald stumbles out of Binny’s Beveridge Depot at North and Milwaukee Avenue with a ringing in his ears and a pint bottle in his coat pocket and a black poison sickness in his brain and in his heart.

Staggering down the deserted walkway, his hooded sweatshirt pulled tight around his huge head as though keeping his brains from spilling out, he unscrews the cheap bottle of sour mash, pops another OxyContin, and takes a big pull. He has tears in his eyes. A distant siren shatters the distance—the keen of a hook and ladder or an EMT wagon on its way to a fire or a heart attack or a drive-by—and there’s no way Oswald can save anybody from their terrible, terrible fate.

He keeps walking and doesn’t look up at the moon. He doesn’t have to. He knows it’s almost full, and Gerbil is gone now, and Oswald Means is just about to lose everything, everything, and he’s drinking himself into oblivion again, because he sees the baleful rawhide-lined face of the Ho-Chunk elder in every dark doorway now, staring at him, judging him, doubting him, and he has nowhere to go, nowhere to flop, nothing but a truck full of guns and canned goods. And he can’t find anybody to save.

The streets are dark and slimy with day-old rain, the sidewalks sparsely populated with stew-bums and screwballs and forgotten souls halfway to the grave, and Oswald hasn’t heard a thing from the Candy Man. He takes another pull off the bottle, and he starts wondering if he should try and give a brochure on conquering the cycle of addiction to one of the poor homeless bastards outside the Damon Street soup kitchen, when he trips on the curb.

He falls down hard, hitting his shoulder blade on a hydrant and breaking the bottle. He starts to laugh a maniacal laugh, and his hyena howls come out of him and rise up into the sky as scratchy and dry as cornhusks.

The desolate noise of his laughter echoes off boarded storefronts and down empty alleys, and the sound of it boomeranging back at him reaches his ears and makes him swallow his mirthless chortle until he’s half crying and half raging at the moon.

The fucking relentless cruel pitiless moon.

30.

Long after closing time—after the chairs out in the dining room have been turned upside down on the tabletops, and most of the kitchen staff have punched out and gone home—Chef Rutti continues ministering to his special private party in the back room. It’s nearly midnight when the maestro personally rolls the dessert cart into the Lionel train room.

“Holy Jesus, look at that,” one of the Morelli brothers marvels as he surveys the stainless steel caddy laden with tiramisu, cannoli, lemon ice, lady fingers dipped in Belgian chocolate, double-fudge lava cake topped with fresh berries, and dessert crepes stuffed with sweet ricotta and pine nuts. “What are you bringing the other guys?”

Drunken laughter.

“Just leave it, Armando, thank you, you’ve created another masterpiece.” Old Man Ferri gives a genteel little nod from across the room. He stands near a whiteboard, which is scrawled with blue erasable marker: ideas, concepts, interesting places to rub out the Indian. The old man is tipsy from too much wine, and has his smoking jacket off, his woolen vest unbuttoned at the top. A thin strand of