Dust Devil Read Online Free PDF

and drugs. In Renzo’s
mind, his father hovered always on that threshold between youth and
adulthood, a bully boy playing at being a man—although no less
awesome and frightening for that. It was only in later years that
Renzo came to understand that beneath the facade of his father’s
preening and bragging, his laughter and wit, his shouting and
bravado, there had lurked a child no less small, insecure and
terrified of the world than Renzo himself had been. So it was that in
the absence of any true religion, his father had been both god and
devil to him, an Italian Adonis and Calabos rolled into one, blessed
with dark handsomeness and bright charisma, cursed with dark hungers
and burning ambition.
    In
Renzo’s manhood, the suppressed memories of his father would
sometimes come rushing to engulf him, so he would close his eyes
tightly against the sudden onslaught and will them to retreat. Still,
they would come—unbidden, irrepressible, triggered by the smell
of cheap cologne or cheap wine; by the sound of a flimsy screen door
banging shut in the summertime or of a car’s souped-up engine
revving and roaring in the street; by the sight of defiant young
punks in T-shirts and blue jeans, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in
one shirt-sleeve, bare arms sporting black tattoos, or of swaggering
young Turks in cheap, jazzy suits, aflash with the gleam of gold
chains and watches and rings. For all those things had been his
father, a small-time, big-city hoodlum who had lurked on the fringes
of organized crime, running drugs and numbers and women for what
outsiders had always called the Mafia, but that was known to those
within its own circle simply as Cosa
Nostra— Our
Thing.
    Renzo’s
father had hungered to become a capo, a
don more legendary than even the fictional Don Corleone, the
Godfather of all Godfathers. How he had yearned to join the ranks of
those who, in their long, sleek black cars, pulled up in the
summertime before the sidewalk café in the elegant old plaza
of the big city, causing a momentary but taut pause in the talk and
laughter of the crowds who sipped colas and iced teas and other tall,
cool drinks in the open air. Instead, Renzo’s father had been
gunned down by some equally hotheaded, ignominious rival in the
meaner streets of the big city, ending his young, hard, fast life as
no more than another Saturday-night fatality, a DOA statistic.
    In
his childhood nightmares, Renzo heard the shots, saw the bright,
macabre crimson flowers that seemed to blossom in slow motion on his
father’s chest, heard the screams and the sirens wailing in
response, saw the brilliant, incongruous blinking of the neon lights
of the bars and strip joints that lined the cracked, littered
sidewalk where his father lay, the cold, methodical flash of the
lights atop the ambulance and police cars. In reality, Renzo had
heard and seen none of what had happened that night two years ago. He
had learned of it only afterward when, scared and hiding in the nooks
and crannies of the tenement where he had lived, he had eavesdropped
on the whispered conversations of its inhabitants.
    He
had been five years old then, tall for his age, but thin, his head
too large for his slender neck, his eyes too big for his pinched
face. But in later years, whenever Renzo gazed into a mirror, it was
his father’s handsome visage he was to see staring back at him:
long, thick, shaggy black hair framing hawkish, strong features—high
cheekbones and a hard, arrogant jaw; intense, molasses-brown eyes
spiked with heavy black lashes and deeply set beneath thick, unruly
raven’s-wing brows; a finely chiseled nose set above a sulky,
frankly sensuous mouth. A mouth that would mock him at those times,
that would curve sardonically at the bitter irony that his own
countenance should so constantly remind him of that other he had
tried so hard to forget.
    His
father’s face he bore. But not his father’s name.
    That
had come from his Greek-Italian