Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 82094 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82094 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
At the end of a long night, the capos all leave for some nearby strip club and Carmine takes me upstairs. “Angelo will see to security,” he says, “but you don’t have to worry. The Panagos don’t have much of a presence in Philly. I wouldn’t let them. This is my goddamn territory.”
His personal room is at the back of the house. It’s bigger than I expected, almost the entire second floor. King-sized bed, huge closet, attached bathroom, even a little sitting area and a small workspace in the far corner. It’s the only room that feels like Carmine and there are little touches of him all over the place: signed baseball memorabilia, his favorite movies in the cabinet under the TV, pictures of him with his family when he was little, the kind of abstract paintings he really likes.
“Is it always like this? Being back here, I mean. All that pressure.” I lounge on the couch near the TV and watch him get undressed. I try to contain my racing heart but looking at him always feels like I’m on the edge of coming apart.
“Yes and no.” He hangs his jacket and slowly unbuttons his shirt. A big bandage covers a wound on his side from the glass when our car got attacked two days ago. Every time I see it, I keep thinking about him throwing himself on top of me and covering me like a shield, ready to die if it means keeping me safe. We’re both lucky he didn’t take a bullet, and the only reason we’re still alive is the quick thinking of his guards up front—if they hadn’t returned fire so fast, we’d all be finished.
“You can give more than three-word answers, you know.”
He smiles slightly and sighs as he rolls his neck. “I grew up in this shit and I guess I’m used to it.”
“It felt like there was some kind of… threat down there.”
“From Christopher? He’s mostly talk. Actually, it’s better when he’s talking like that, it means things haven’t gotten so bad that they’re going to stop complaining and start trying to get rid of me. He says what everyone’s thinking and I appreciate that about him, it keeps me honest, and I can figure out a way to respond.”
“God, I can’t imagine that. You’re constantly just trying to survive, aren’t you?”
He walks over and sits slowly in an armchair across from me. The light’s dim and he’s staring at me with dark, brooding eyes, wearing only a pair of joggers. His chest muscles flex and I stare at his body, at his abs and the tattoos on his skin and the bandage over the wound and all the little cuts and nicks and scars, and I wonder if I traced all those marks, all those whorls of knotty scar tissue and all those ancient wounds, if I’d find a map to his heart through layers of tragedy.
He speaks as though wreathed in smoke. “My life’s always been this way, even when I was little. My father never once let me forget that the capos aren’t my friends, and no matter how much I like them, their lives are ours to spend in the name of the family. They’re my employees, and if I can’t keep them happy or at least under control then they’ll turn on me. He always said, you can rule with fear or you can rule with love, but you can’t rule with both. I’ve always tried to split the difference, but maybe my old man was right.”
“You want the capos to love you?”
“I want them to respect me. That’s a kind of love. I want them to see that I’m dragging this family kicking and screaming into the future. Some get it, some don’t, and Christopher is one of those that don’t. Until they can all understand what I’m trying to do, my life will always be in danger no matter where I am. Here, Texas, doesn’t matter. There’s only ever been one constant in my life, and that’s the pressure to survive.”
I sit back and try to imagine going through a world where everything is kill or be killed, like growing up in the middle of the jungle where even your family is composed of hungry jackals waiting for you to screw up so they can rip out your throat. My family wasn’t easy and they had high expectations, but I was always safe. I never wondered if the next day would be my last.
There’s no safety in this place, not really anyway. There’s always an edge somewhere and beyond that edge is nothing but the abyss. Carmine’s adept that walking right along it, barely keeping himself from tipping in, but that doesn’t mean the fear and terror of being so close to failure and death doesn’t affect him.