“I’m asking,” Chris says, “who’s more valuable. Who’s the better soldier? Who’s the bigger earner?”
“Who’s the finook?” Paulie asks.
Jesus God, he’s stupid, Chris thinks.
Peter gets it, though. He understands it’s the image that matters, not the reality. “So you think we should give Sal the green light on Frankie.”
Chris shrugs. “What would you do to a guy who goes around saying you’re gay?”
Peter mimes squeezing a trigger.
Chris shrugs again.
“But Sal is a fag,” Paulie says.
“So fucking what?” Chris says.
“You kidding me?” Paulie asks. “What they do is disgusting. Makes me want to puke.”
“You telling me you never fucked a woman in the ass?” Chris says.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It was a woman,” Paulie says.
Peter says, “Let’s wait. See if Sal handles our Marvin problem. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
Classic Peter, Chris thinks, kicking the can down the road. But it does make a certain kind of sense—if Marvin kills Sal, we won’t have to choose between him and Frankie V.
Paulie takes a piece of the fudge.
“The fuck,” Peter says.
“What?”
“You gonna eat that?”
“Why not?” Paulie says, shoving it into his mouth. “It’s good.”
Behind the wheel of a boosted Caddy, Sal can see the playground from a block away.
Moolies in their hooded sweatshirts jumping up and down. Problem is picking out which one is Marvin. As he pulls up alongside the court, he remembers that Marvin is the one who doesn’t suck.
Then he sees a guy in a gray PC hoodie do a cross-over dribble that about breaks his defender’s ankles and go up for a slam dunk.
Marvin.
Sal rolls down his window.
Marvin feels him.
Then hangs on the rim and sees him.
Demetrius yells, “Gun!”
Marvin lets go of the rim, as he drops pulls his pistol taped inside the kangaroo pouch on the sweaty and fires.
Then something punches him in the chest.
He’s dead before he hits the ground.
Sal drives three blocks before he realizes he’s been shot.
The fuckin’ monkey hit him in the arm.
The adrenaline masks the pain but he’s bleeding like crazy and has to get it taken care of quick. But he can’t go to the hospital that’s two minutes away because if he walks into the E-room with a bullet wound, they call the cops. He drops the gun out the window and then pulls out on Route 95 and drives north. A doctor in Pawtucket is behind in his payments.
Maybe he can make it there before he bleeds out.
Danny sits in the waiting room.
Doctors’ waiting rooms are purgatory, he thinks. An endless wait for salvation that may or may not come. The torture of hope—you hope it’s not a tumor, you hope if it is, it’s benign, you hope . . .
Even the name on the door is scary.
Oncologist.
Their GP sent them there. Said this guy was good.
What’s that even mean, Danny asks himself as he pages through a well-thumbed copy of Good Housekeeping. All the magazines in there are women’s magazines. Of course they are, the people are here for breast cancer, idiot.
But what does “good” mean against cancer? The doctor can make it not cancer? He can change what’s already there? Tell a young woman with an infant and her whole life in front of her that she’s going to get to live that life?
He looks at a recipe for sloppy joes, then checks his watch again. The time won’t move. It doesn’t in purgatory. What the nuns taught him about eternity. Finally the door opens and the doctor is standing there.
“Mr. Ryan?”
Danny stands up.
“Come on in, please.”
Danny follows him into a small room. Terri is sitting there and she doesn’t look good—her eyes are moist, red-rimmed. The doctor gestures Danny to a chair beside her and then sits down behind his desk and holds up an X-ray for Danny to see and uses his pen to point out a “mass” in Terri’s left breast.
Danny flashes back to a moment on the beach, that moment Pam first arrived, bringing so much death with her.
“I like your boobs.”
“Good answer.”
The doctor is saying something about a “biopsy.” “。 . . if it’s positive, we’ll go back into surgery and remove the breast.”
“Then what?” Terri asks. “Are we looking at chemo?”