Chump Change by Dan Fante Read Free Book Online

wasn’t Dante. I had no fondness for dogs. Although, for a moment, I felt bad for Rocco. But so what. I wasn’t going to congratulate him on murdering a gopher.
    We stood looking at each other. He continued humming his high-pitched falsetto and appearing tense. His whining stopped only when he took quick, short, deep breaths.
    I could see that he wanted a reaction, for me to scoop up the rodent, then pat him on the head and say, “goo-boy.”
    I didn’t. I turned and started back up the steps to the house. It was the wrong move and it pissed him off. The humming got suddenly louder until, when I didn’t stop, it became a snarl. I was afraid. Filled with whiskey, but afraid. He might attack me. There was a story the old man told about Rocco biting the gas man after he’d mistakenly patted my sister on the head. I wanted no trouble.
    What I did was stop, a compromise maneuver, halfway to the top of the steps. I had no skill at dealing with an angry dog. But he waited, too, studying me with intense concentration. It was a standoff.
    Something my father had told me years before came to me. A statement of how he dealt with meeting new people. To define his own territory, my father would insult the other guy in the first five minutes of conversation. It made me wonder if Rocco might not be imitating the old man and doing the same thing.
    When he didn’t charge, I felt braver and decided to sit down, even pulling my cigarettes from my jacket and lighting one up. His humming started again, but he didn’t advance. The stench of the dead carcass seeped past the haze of my booze, its foulness hitting my stomach and lodging there like the ache from food poisoning.
    Five minutes passed that way. Finally Fabrizio puked over the porch rail, a projectile stream that panicked Rocco. It caused the dog to snatch up the gopher and disappear into the night.
    Once inside the house, I put on some coffee and steered my brother into the bathroom where he cleaned himself up by splashing water against the puke on his “SC” sweatshirt and rubbing it in with a towel.
    My body was exhausted. Too tired to telephone the hospital and hear bad news. My own confusion kept my mind numb, under control. Walking Fab into one of the guest rooms, I sat him down on the bed where he fell back, rolled into a fetal position, and immediately passed out.
    In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup of coffee with four fingers of the whiskey in the mug and pressed playback onthe answering machine next to the phone. If there had been a change in the old man’s condition, there would be a message.
    I was curious what the people who knew my father and mother were saying, so I listened to each message, peeping again into my parents’ lives for insights that had eluded me during my childhood. What were people’s expressions of hope and distress? What emotions were they reciprocating? Why did other people like these odd creatures?
    A dozen different calls had come in over several days and were being stored on the machine by my mother, Judith Joyce Dante. She was collecting them and I knew that she would answer each at the appropriate time. It was her way. She’d respond in order, systematically, like she did everything.
    There were upset friends from Northern California and Colorado, my mother’s sister and her husband, two Italian cousins expressing drama and sorrow, neighbors showing concern, and a few calls from movie people.
    One message in particular shocked me. It was from Phil Asner, a once famous TV producer-director and former poker buddy and friend of Jonathan Dante. His presentation of lamentation and alarm seemed completely genuine. I was surprised because I knew that he and Dante had not talked in years. My father’s cruel tongue had destroyed the friendship. Dante had the terrible knack of uncovering another person’s weak spot, then waiting for a vulnerable moment so he could crush that spot with an ax.
    Asner and the old man had pitched a film