Island of Divine Music by John Addiego Read Free Book Online Page A

young woman, and although Joe was a straight shooter and teetotaler compared to his brothers, he knew enough about the blue-light district to guess this girl had been around. She was beautiful and dark, to be sure, but there was something tawdry about her, something in her eyes, which had streetcorners in them, some odor of desperation, of drugs or booze. I don’t know who this is, Joe said. And I don’t want you to hang around somebody like this, he said to himself.
    His daughter laughed. Dad, this is Maria!
    Who?
    Your stepmom!
    The young woman shook his hand, then gestured for them to wait before she darted off. Penny ran once through an obstacle course of rolling barrels and tipping boards while Joe pictured his old man in the labyrinth of mirrors, a lusty, snorting, white-haired monster with booze on his breath and goat horns sprouting out of his skull. He imagined how he might scare the children, and how some boy like the little guy who’d just guided Joe through the mirrors might trip the old man into a glass panel or jump on his back and strangle him. Maria and Penny were talking, as much with hands as with words, near the giant barrel while Joe mused about Giuseppe. Penny ran to him.
    Grandpa’s lost! She tugged on Joe’s arm.
    So what else is new?
    He took off with the baby!
    G iuseppe had been getting lost on a routine basis. Penny told Joe about an afternoon spent with Aunt Francesca and Cousin Susan hunting all over Little Italy, down Columbus Street to Washington Square and the boccie courts, to the liquor stores in Chinatown,and finally finding him at the wharf staring at the water. Joe wanted to know why in the hell this young mother had left the baby with an old drunk whose brain had one foot on a banana peel, but he couldn’t navigate her Spanish. They jogged through the carnival crowd, under the Ferris wheel, which turned slowly and disappeared in fog, among the dart-throwing and ring-tossing booths, then into the huge arcade. Joe remembered putting a penny into one of the old machines many years ago, cranking the handle until he saw, in a jerky, magical dance of white flesh against a black background, his first glimpse of a naked woman.
    They crossed the highway to the beach. The fog lifted, swept to the south like wind-tossed hair, and the sudden gleam of sunlight made Joe squint. Penny saw them first and pointed, across the slick plane of sand which disappeared in fog, at the tiny, smoky figures of a man in a fedora and a toddler holding his hand. The old goat was moving stiffly, and the child’s shiny black hair bounced in the wind. Penny and Maria stepped over the garbage and driftwood and kicked off their shoes while Joe sat on the seawall and looked at his watch. He yelled to Penny that he needed to make another phone call pretty soon, and she called back that they’d be on the beach with Grandpa.
    Don’t get your clothes wet, he yelled. Something stank, a dead seal or some bum’s turd buried in the sand, and he stepped down to the beach and walked over to a log upwind. He imagined that his brothers were probably drunk and laughing while a bunch of sleazy bastards put their business in the shitcan. He imagined his father having sex with a teenaged whore, the woman dancing around inthe surf with his daughter. The girls raised their skirts high above their knees while the water foamed around them.
    He crushed a crab shell under his heel and hurled a stone at a log. He picked up a shell and observed it among the tabulations he’d made on his palm in the house of mirrors. Joe imagined some hermit crab had once lived in it, and wondered how the hell a crab could build a house like that, then realized that the crab had probably just found it and taken it the way his old man had snagged neglected land from lazy investors for next to nothing. But something built it, he said to himself, some little shellfish, and as he studied the perfect spiral he thought how somebody might explain its design with