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

false teeth and gummed his nose, so Gerbil resorts to another old TV trick—she produces her last crumpled twenty-dollar bill, sliding it across the scarred counter with all the drama of a mid-season Kojak re-run. The clerk tells her to fuck off and die.

Vexed and a little indignant, she marches out of the hotel and returns to the idling taxi.

Plan B: She asks the cabbie to take her to the nearest bodega or mini-mart. She rushes into the store and purchases a sack full of provisions: caffeine pills, caffeinated water, caffeine patches, caffeinated suckers, flashlight, and a crossword puzzle book. Then she comes back out and has the taxi-driver take her back to the Wells Street fleabag.

Then she cuts the cab loose.

Oswald’s truck is right where he left it, parked behind a drift of garbage in an adjacent alley. His doors are locked, the big road-trunk still roped down back in the cargo bay, locked up tight, nested in moldering blankets and tarps.

Gerbil presses her face against the glass of the cab window. The duffel bag is gone. Gerbil takes a deep breath, and girds herself.

Then she climbs into the cargo bay with her sack of amphetamines and groceries.

For Oswald, the rest of that day passes in a mirage of jacked-up activity. He organizes his equipment, looks in the paper to make sure the lunar cycle is due to crest the following evening, and then makes one quick side-trip down to the Harold Washington Library to download news clippings of Freddie Felson’s 1999 conspiracy trial—the one from which he walked on a technicality.

Oswald makes Xeroxes of Freddie’s mug shots and keeps them in his wallet.

He returns to the flophouse at 6, eats a square meal of Chinese carry-out, and pops a couple of Halcions. He needs a full night’s rest. He needs his wits about him for the last save.

After dark, right before the sleeping pills begin to kick in, he goes out onto the rust-flaked fire escape, and he has a smoke and gazes up at the sky. Thin wisps of clouds barely veil the harvest moon as it rises over the filthy spires of the north side.

Oswald stares at the big buttery sphere, as yellow as cornmeal, and feels a sliver of panic like an ice-chip in his chest. “Goddamn thing looks full already,” he mutters to himself, wondering if he’s too late, wondering if he’s going to hell after all.

“It’s not,” says a voice behind him. “Not yet. But it’s close.”

Oswald doesn’t have to turn around. He recognizes the voice of Alberta Goldstein. He nods and murmurs, “Fucking thing is beautiful.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Beautiful and horrible at the same time.”

“Yes.”

Oswald yawns. “We’ll know tomorrow. Full moon and high tide.”

He goes back inside and collapses onto the rickety twin bed next to the ticking radiator, and he falls asleep almost immediately, and for hours he sleeps the dreamless, soulless sleep of the dead... as the moon outside starts on its last revolution toward the sun.

PART III:

DEAD MAN’S SWITCH

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

- Johnny Rotten

33.

Dawn on that last day brings a chill to the air.

By mid-morning, the whir of human activity is already flowing through the big stone archway of the Amtrak Station off Canal Street.

Inside the station, the great vaulted confines of dark wood and marble echo with public address announcements and shuffling shoe leather, as the escalators endlessly cycle commuters down the long decline to the ninth circle of departure gates. The air has a dense, acrid perfume to it—a mélange of grit and disinfectant, and even traces of diesel fumes—that gives Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro a headache as he strides under banks of fluorescent lights and travel posters and directional signs.

He wears a long Burberry overcoat and carries a scuffed attaché case. At this hour, in this getup, he could easily be mistaken for a senior vice president at a LaSalle Street law firm, if it weren’t for his big square head of Brill-Creamed hair and the gold chains around his thick neck. Upon closer scrutiny, one might instead peg him as Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, circa 1963.

“Look at this idiot,” he murmurs as he reaches the bottom of the escalator and steps off the metal riser onto the nicked parquet of the Gate Level. He has already spied the dimwit grandson of the don loitering across the promenade near the threshold of a tobacco shop, holding some elaborate coffee concoction, sucking so hard on the drinking straw he appears to be attempting to give the drink an orgasm..

“You’re late, Cucumber,” Marky-Mark Ferri says to Dalessandro with a curt nod, chewing the cud of the straw as the big capo approaches with a glower on his face.

“Get rid of this.” Dalessandro grabs the Frappuccino from the kid and tosses it into a nearby receptacle, spattering the stucco wall with chocolate ejaculate. “And don’t call me that. C’mon.”

Dalessandro turns on his heels, and heads toward a steel door marked TEAM AMTRAK—PERSONNEL ONLY.

The Ferri kid has to jog to keep up with the gunsel’s big strides. “Little sensitive this morning?” the kid cracks out of the side of his mouth.

“Get your mind in the game, kid,” Dalessandro mutters without breaking stride.

The fact is, Jimmy Dalessandro is kind of defensive about the nickname. In Mob World, nicknames are part of the deal, part of the patois, part of the rakish subculture that dates back to the Italian middle-ages. But the problem with Dalessandro’s nickname is the way it originated—the embarrassing irony of the word cucumber. He got tagged with the moniker three years ago, when he was coming out of the steam bath at the Chicago Athletic Club and a couple of Riccardo boys saw the size of his penis. Or, more accurately—and not to put too fine a point on it—the lack of size.

From the moment he entered puberty, Jimmy Dalessandro has suffered the stigma and self-loathing