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

we’re gonna do, we’re gonna destroy and get rid of this son of a bitch so he can never recur.”

An awful silence descends on the room as the definition sinks in.

The little train continues clicking cheerfully around the rim of the ceiling.

Ferri scans the group. “That’s why we need a place to do this thing that has the proper—”

The old man stops.

Across the room, Jimmy Dalessandro watches the don with keen interest.

The old man seems to be staring now at something in the middle distance, something beyond the group, something up high in the room.

“Boss?” Dalessandro watches.

“Containment…” Ferri’s sallow, sunken eyes are fixed on the little train as it circles the space on its little O-gauge track.

“Boss, you okay?” Jimmy Dalessandro takes a step toward the don. “What is it?”

The old man watches the train, his gray head rotating on its axis like a dog watching a squirrel. The little scale model of the Galena and Chicago freight, circa 1920s, continues on its merry clacking way around the little plastic guardrails and silhouettes of railroad crossings. At last the old man nods, and mutters softly to himself, “Jesus Christ, why didn’t I think of that right off the bat?”

“Think of what, boss?”

Old Man Ferri turns and looks at the big capo in the sharkskin suit like he’s just awakened from a dream. “Jimmy, we got a guy down at the Transit Authority in our pocket, don’t we?”

Dalessandro thinks for a second. “Yeah, boss. We got a couple of guys down there. Why?”

The old man just licks his wormy lips with relish and grins.

His smile—aside from its rotten array of ill-fitting dentures—is the kind of smile that Anthony “the Mink” Ferri most likely displayed as a child, coming down the steps of his parents’ Garfield Park two-flat on Christmas morning, discovering a shiny new train set under the tree: the perfect Christmas present.

31.

Everything Gerbil Goldstein knows about following somebody, she learned from TV. The empty calories of crap shows like Magnum PI, and Cagney and Lacey, and Hawaii 5-0, and Charlie’s Angels, and Remington Steele, and Miami Vice, and Diagnosis Murder, and all the other insipid detective shows that have rotted her brain over the years, have given her a false sense of mastery over an incredibly difficult task. She learns this on those final three days, trying to keep up with Oswald Means without being seen by him.

It starts at the airport, right after the big man gives her the kiss-off. She gets in a cab and has the cabbie make one revolution around the terminal, and when they get back to the Departures Lane, she tells the driver to pull up three car lengths behind Oswald’s S-10 and sit tight for a second. Then she tells the driver to follow that truck. She always wanted to say that to a cabbie. Like she’s in an episode of Mannix—“Follow that truck, buster, and step on it!”

But it’s never ever-ever-ever as easy as it looks on TV. Struggling to keep up with the pickup, the cab manages to run about a million red lights, and nearly gets creamed in a sideways mash-up on Milwaukee Avenue. And then Oswald makes a quick turn-off into a liquor store lot. The only thing that saves Gerbil from being made is the fact that Oswald is half in the bag by the time he comes out of Binny’s Beveridge Depot—he must have polished off the pint bottle stashed in his glove box by then—staggering back to his truck, glancing over his shoulder at the cab with a sheepish look.

Eventually the taxi lets Gerbil out near the mouth of an alley off Damon at 12:30 that night.

Gerbil spends the rest of that evening freezing her nipples off on the roof of a garment factory across the street. All she has for company is a filthy tarp she found in an ash can and a stale granola bar she found in her jacket pocket. This is another thing they never show on TV: the boring shit, the endless hours of waiting, the tedious eyeballing of Oswald’s flaccid form passed out on the greasy pavement across the street.

She dozes off just before dawn, slipping into a momentary nightmare in which she’s getting pissed on by a giant pig at a Pink Floyd concert.

Dawn breaks hard and harsh that next day over the mountain range of charred chimney peaks and vent stacks along Damon Avenue. Igniting the neighborhood like a flare, the daylight stirs the bats back into belfries and rousts the drunks back into their cardboard squats.

On a nameless side street, the angry sunlight cants down into a lonely alley, hanging in the motes of whirling trash, before landing on a body.

Slumped on its side in a puddle of piss, the big dark lump of a human being rolls over onto its back and gurgles a mucous-clogged groan of protest at the invading light. A broken bottle in an oil-spotted brown paper bag lies next to the poor soul, alongside an array of belongings—cigarettes, a few dollars in change, a cell phone—strewn across the cracked pavement where the man fell the night before.

The big man moans the morning away, his eyes glued shut, his mouth a toxic waste dump. He doesn’t hear the sudden chirp of the cell phone next to him, nor does he register the approach of a stray dog.

The animal—a mangy German Shepherd nosing around the base of dumpsters for scraps—approaches cautiously, eyeing the fallen drunk out of the corner of its yellow eyes. The trill of the cell phone perks the creature’s ears, which pin back at each ringing noise.

“Can’t go to school today, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sick, and I’m gonna flunk the test, I got a fever, I’m gonna flunk, I’m gonna flunk out, I’m gonna…” In his mumbling delirium, the fallen man slowly awakens, blinking at the light, his thick neck cracking.

Across the alley, the dog sniffs the pavement around the cell phone,